In a small room at My Fancy I found a few books, and among them “The
Faery Queen.” During these first months I read and reread and read
again this volume with a kind of desperate clinging to its beauty. It
came to help me, to give me a kind of gleam.
I saw in a sort of moonlight how general was the problem, how general
and how deep, and how it allied with all other delays and struggles,
how they were all one, mere varieties of one another, and how both ill
and remedy might lay somewhere in that mysterious other-world called
“Within.”
I saw it, I say, as by moonlight, but it went then no further. Instead,
when I had been six months at My Fancy my soul entered Egyptian
darkness. Outer life went on as it had done, but within I sat in
blackness, and before me sat the Sphinx, and I did not move and she did
not move.
There was a bit of beach, a lonely place, that I haunted in these
months. At dawn I went to it to bathe. There were no great breakers,
but I swam and floated, and then came out and lay naked upon the
bone-white sand.
The sun rose, but my soul was dark and my mind a treadmill. And
there was a narrow estuary, sluggish water and shoal, winding between
mangroves. I came down through the cane to this and found a boat and on
winter days that knew far more heat than summer days in Scotland, rowed
myself up and down or sat idle in a shadow from the dismal growth. Here
and yonder stood a long-legged wading bird, motionless as I. Crabs
scuttled over the mud; at low tide the oysters were visible fastened
to the mangrove roots, the forlorn forest of them; where the soil was
firmer tall trees overhung the water that mirrored an azure, empty sky.
It was not so unlike Africa, but I lacked Rathbone Lace. I did not
want him; I wished now to be alone. Sometimes I rode into the hills
but not often. At long intervals I rode three leagues or so to the
nearest town, sat for an hour or two in the inn, wine before me that I
did not always drink, then rode back to My Fancy. But it was the house
itself, the house at eve when Atkins had said good night, the house in
the night time--I slept, then I waked. My room was large, with a bare,
stained floor, with a couple of tall presses, with three windows giving
upon the cane and the sea. I rose when I could not sleep and paced
this floor or took my station at now the one and now the other window.
Sometimes when the moon shone I opened my door and paced barefooted the
great upper hall or wandered in the vacant rooms. These windows were
closed. I returned and from my own heard the wind in the cane and the
surf upon the shore.
It was now the world, not one part of it but the whole.
It was now, _What am I and what is He?_ not a particular year and
plan in the so-called existence of a so-called David Scott.
It was a deep and large place, not the Slave Coast nor the slave ship,
nor Amory Hall, nor Daniel Askew’s, nor My Fancy, nor the _King
William_, nor the Tolbooth, nor Culloden Field where white men
shot one another down, though all of them were in that ocean and that
whirlwind and that mountain of fire.
The place was dark, the fire was dark. At times there were plains of
ashes and then I thought, “Why not kill myself?”
But I was not the kind to kill myself. Had I been so I should have done
it at Daniel Askew’s.
There I had been the slave. Now I was, so to speak, the master, being
manager for a master. There I had thought, “Why not kill myself?” Here
I thought the same. For all the worldly difference, the state was the
same.
I could leave My Fancy and I could leave the _Janet_. But others
would step into my shoes as I had stepped into theirs. I did not know
then what I felt, but now I know that I felt the General Man and his
self-destructiveness.
Up and down, up and down, I walked barefoot up and down. I walked the
long hall as it were the deck of a ship and saw the moon framed in
the western window, and each time I faced that way it was nearer the
sea.--As I walked the old Lykewake Dirge came and walked with me.
This ae night, this ae night,
_Every night and alle_,
Fire and sleet and candle light,
_And Christ receive thy saule_.
I read it with Mysie Johnston in the glen at home, and the bird was
singing in the thorn.--Then I was at Daga and in the Oil Palm village,
and a desolate wind howled in my soul. I saw the _Janet_, and
Fanny lying dead upon the heaped slave deck.--O Mysie Johnston and the
throstle in the white thorn!--O the gross, thick darkness!
To Brigg o’ Dread thou comest at laste.
It was not my own fortune but the world’s fortune. My own and the
world’s were one fortune, and it was bad.
From Brigg o’ Dread when thou mayst passe,
_Every night and alle_,
To Purgatory fire thou comest at laste,
_And Christ receive thy saule_.
The moon hung just over the sea. I stood in the window and watched it,
but my soul was away with the Sphinx.
If ever thou gavest meat and drink
_Every night and alle_
The fire sall never make you shrink.--
If meat and drink thou never gavest nane,
_Every night and alle_.
The fire sall burn thee to the bare bane.--
What was meat and drink?
“To do the will of Him who sent me.” That started out. Who sent me?
What am I and what is He? _The same, and I feel my own wounding?_
The fire sall burn thee to the bare bane.
The moon touched the sea. Cæsar began to bark. A voice outside was
calling. I went to the window at the rear of the hall and heard Dick
quieting Cæsar, then Atkins’ “What’s the matter there?”
“It’s a child very sick, sah. Maria’s child. She say for Jesus’ sake
give her some medicine!”
Maria cooked for us and lived just by the kitchen across the yard. I
called down, “I’ll come, Bob.”
A torch lighted the hut. The child lay contorted upon a mat on the
earthen floor. I thought it was poison and went back to the house
for remedies out of a big closet that looked and smelled a veritable
apothecary’s shop, then recrossed the yard and got the stuff at last
down the child’s throat, after which we made a fire and held him by it,
rubbing his body. The medicine worked, he vomited, the small twisted
frame relaxed, he opened his eyes, gasped and began to wail. Maria
gathered him into her lap, I gave him a spoonful of weakened rum; he
hushed, stretched himself, then curled into a ball and went to sleep.
“He’s all right now.”
Maria laid him upon the mat, then stood up. She was a slender,
charcoal-dark, dramatic creature. Now she raised her hands to heaven,
then spread them abroad, then curtseyed to me not once but thrice, each
time more profoundly than the foregoing, just as, I think, she may have
seen the young ladies of the North family practise for the Governor’s
ball in Spanish Town. “Thank you, master! Maria thanks you, master! May
the Lawd Jesus stand for you at the end! O Maria and Bob and Little Bob
thanks you, master! May the Lawd Jesus step up to the Big Chair and
say, ‘I was a little black boy and I took what was bad for me, and this
white man worked over me and brought me through!’--Yaas, master, what
you want you just say----”
David Scott went back to the great house. He had seen abundant small
kindnesses, abundant small, right actions through life. A kind of surge
of these everywhere and in all times came upon him. But there rose to
meet it a corresponding wave of cruelties and stupidities.--Something,
something was needed so tall that it saw through and over both and
built another sea!
I threw myself on my bed and slept and waked unhappy. I went down to
the mill and did a round of things, and then I rowed again among the
mangroves, and felt again oppressive night, more deep, more black than
before.
Another week and the time came round to drink and forget in a paradise
not without horror.
That two weeks was over. I came down to the sea at dawn, stripped and
plunged in and swam across to the reef. And here I sat and watched the
coming of the sun, and all the world was still and dry and empty to me.
After an hour I swam back to shore, dressed and came up through the
screen of sea grape to the road. A man walking by turned his face
toward me. A white man, rather tall and plainly dressed, with a long,
pale, quiet face, broken and made animate by very bright, dark eyes. He
seemed to have been upon the road some time, judging by the dust upon
him and his broken shoes and an air of not being fresh from bed and
ease. He carried a staff and leaned upon it when he stopped to greet
me. “Good morning, friend!”
I answered “Good morning!” and made to cross the road toward the My
Fancy opening.
“Can thee tell me how far I am from the town?”
“Three leagues,” I said, and noticed again his weariness. “Have you
been walking through the night?”
“Through much of it, friend.”
“Do you want breakfast? This is the My Fancy estate. If you will go to
the house they will give you bread and meat and coffee.”
He stood as if pondering, his hand upon his staff, his eyes level, then
raised. “Why, friend, if thee will I shall be grateful.”
“Come along then. I am going there myself. The family is from home.”
For a few paces we moved together upon the highway, then turned under
the huge cotton tree into the road through the cane. He looked at it,
on either hand, tall and waving in the early light.
“Thee grows so green and high! Thee, too, gives praise, and thy great
longing is to give full and innocent praise.” He turned his eyes upon
me. “What is thy name, friend?”
“David Scott.”
“Then, David, if thee did know how empty is my stomach, thee would be
glad thee has the means to fill it!”
“Why, hunger is hunger,” I said. “I have been hungry. ‘Thee’ and
‘friend’ and ‘David.’ Are you a Quaker?”
“So thee calls us,” he answered cheerfully.
“I have met two or three in my life,” I said, “and found them very good
folk. But there are few of you in Jamaica, and I seem to have heard
that you are not particularly welcome.”
He laughed. “Thy qualifying word is not strong enough! I have been five
months in Jamaica, and truly, David, thee is the only man, apparently
in authority, whose voice I have heard say ‘Quaker’ and yet continue
friendly. Thee is in authority?”
“I am manager of this estate.”
“If thee asks me to breakfast will thee not get into trouble with thy
master?”
“I do not precisely call him master,” I answered. “Besides, he is in
London.”
We walked on between the cane shaking in the morning wind. I did not
care if he were sectary, Jew or paynim. My likes and dislikes did not
depend on these things. Presently we met two great wagons and their
oxen with half a dozen men bound for the Five Trees field. Some were
riding, some walking, and all cheerful enough in the bright air and
free with “Morning, master! Morning, master!” We stood aside to let all
pass, and when they were by the Quaker turned and watched them into the
distance.
“I gather, friend David, that it is a kindly plantation. Good the child
in the arms of Giant Ill.”
I did not answer. The house now rose before us, and from the rear was
blown a great conch shell.
“That sounds sweetly!” he said. “I do not suppose thee has been in
Africa?”
“Yes, I have. Many times.”
He looked surprised. “As a trader?”
“Yes. On the slave ship _Janet_.”
Checking his long, deliberate stride, he stood under a palm--we now
had left the cane--and looked at me with a new interest, but hardly a
flattering one. “Ah!” he said. “And what made thee do that?”
I answered, “Needs must when the devil drives.”
“Is thee sure he drives?”
“Not wholly but sufficiently sure,” I answered and preceded him up the
ten stone steps to the door.
At breakfast I proposed to him that he rest with us until to-morrow.
He was evidently footsore, had been walking, he said, for the better
part of a week. Now and then he met with a lift but not often. In the
town to which he was making lived a brother Friend who could give him
certain information. He was going to get this, and then return the
length of the island to Kingston in time for the sailing of the _Mary
Pembroke_ for Liverpool. I asked him why he had not bought or hired
a horse, and he answered that in the first place he was a city man,
little used to horseback, and that when they talked of mountains and
rough paths instead of roads a voice within had said, “Thee knows two
feet. Rest content without six.” In the second place he was short of
money and must save where he could in order to spend where he must. The
enterprise in which he was engaged, he said, had been more expensive
than he and others had reckoned. “That does not matter,” he ended. “But
I must skimp between here and Liverpool.”
“What is the enterprise?”
We were seated, just us two, at the mahogany table in the hall. Atkins
was gone to the mill. We had eaten and drunk, and a boy that we called
Puck was taking away the dishes. My guest waited till he was out of
the door at the back, then he said, with his bright, dark eyes very
full and quiet upon me, “David, we who are Friends are at many points
not of one mind with the world around us. One of those points is the
propriety of that very slave trade in which thee has been engaged. Two
years ago our Society resolved to send a member into North America and
another to this island to the end that it might have certain first-hand
observations. I was chosen for Jamaica, and I have been going about the
work with quietness for a year and more.”
“My wonder is,” I said, “that being so free-spoken, you are not
spending your time in some gaol.”
“I am not always so free-spoken,” he answered serenely. “There was
a little trouble at Spanish Town where I was accused of preaching
sedition and inciting slaves to rebellion. But the Lord’s hand was over
me and I escaped.”
We rose from table, and I showed him a room where he might rest. It
was next to mine. We paused together by a window. “Will thee go again,
David, on the slave ship?”
“Yes. In a few months’ time.”
“Things are strangely written,” he said. “Perhaps it is to some good
that thee goes.”
“Do you Quakers think to end human slavery?”
“It is the Light Within, not us ‘Quakers’ that will end it. It may
be a long time, David. There are instruments, of course. And times
and seasons. As for African slavery it may continue a long, long
time. Where it is established. The parents and the children and the
grandchildren and their grandchildren. Those who are already brought
and the born in the land, and they who shall be born. But it is borne
in upon Friends, David--and others, too; and others too--that the Slave
Trade itself might cease. The making and bringing more across the sea,
continually and forever. The tearing them from their land and forcing
them here. It might cease, and cease in our day, David. The Light has
grown that much, it seems to us. It will grow further, of course, but
not for a time.--So, David, thee may not be chained to thy slave ship
forever.”
“Am I chained? It is said to be the Negroes who are chained.”
“Oh, thee is chained!” he answered cheerfully. “Thee and thy ship
captain and crew. Thee is chained here, my poor David. Can thee not see
and hear thy manacles? _I_ can. Thee wears thy manager’s chains,
and the owner here wears his chains.”
I said, “This is the first time I have ever heard it determinedly said
that the traffic with Africa for slaves should and must stop. I know
men who would secretly welcome that, and I know men who would rouse the
dogs and beat you forth.--Yes, I am chained, but to something else and
more than My Fancy and the _Janet_. Something larger and darker. I
am chained to living, and the devil and myself.”
He jerked his hand toward the shining cane and the sea and the road
between. “The Voice said back there, ‘Lo, a poor, chained one!’ So I
came with thee, David.”
I broke into laughter. “So I and not you are the fed? Well, let your
pride have it so!”
He put out his long hand and touched me and his dark, bright eyes came
again fully into mine. “Both of us are fed, David, both, both! Thee has
done unto me and I have done unto thee. The chain is in thy laughter
and thy slavery is deep, including as it does all slavery. But thee
will come forth, David! Thee will lift the gravestone and come out and
up.”
With that he made a strange, wide gesture and turned from the window to
the cool quiet room and its bed. “I was walking the most of the night,
and yesterday too was tiring unto me.”
I left him to his repose and went to the mill. Things there proceeded
as usual. I caught up the threads of work neglected or done awry by
David Scott during his two weeks. I was busy, and so partly buried my
Quaker and his errands, and Daga and the _Janet_, and that dark
idleness inside me where I sat with the Sphinx. The conches and horns
blew for dinner. I returned to the house and found him still sleeping.
Atkins and I ate together, and I told him just that I had sheltered
a Quaker who seemed a good and harmless man and would depart if not
to-night then in the morning.
Atkins looked at me shrewdly. “Aye, they seem harmless, but to most
of our folk, Mr. Scott, a pirate appears the luckier guest! They’re a
curious lot, with their ‘thees’ and ‘Call no man master’ and ‘Go not to
war’ and their ‘Voice’ and ‘Inner Light.’ Mr. North can’t abide them.
Not that there are many in Jamaica!”
“This man came from England and is going back on the _Mary
Pembroke_.”
“And that’s a good thing for him to do!” said Atkins, and pushed back
from table. “Of course he can’t poison the house while he is here, and
I just wouldn’t say anything about him in the letter to London this
month.”
He was cautious, liking My Fancy and meaning to abide there. David
Scott did not intend abiding, but he recognized responsibility. “He
will go in the morning at latest,” I said, and went to my own room
for the afternoon rest, then to the mill, then again, an hour before
sunset, to the house, and found him sitting in the porch, his bundle
beside him, his staff across his knees and his eyes upon the very
splendid clouds in the west, above the sea. “There will be a good
moon,” he said. “I will eat with thee, David, and then thee shall set
me on the road and I will trudge to the town and ere midnight knock at
Friend Thomas’s door.”
I said, “If you care to pass the night----” but he shook his head, and
I did not press it. Puck gave us supper in the hall, Atkins absenting
himself for his own reasons. He told me certain things that I had not
known, having to do with his Society and with individuals out of it.
I had not known there was any conscious attempt anywhere putting out,
however faintly, force against the Slave Trade. But he said there was a
growing feeling, that it would come to a head, and some day the whole
matter would be brought before Parliament. He took from his pocketbook
a slip of paper and laid it under my eyes. It was the copy of a
Resolution passed by the Yearly Meeting of Friends.
“We fervently warn all in profession with us that they carefully avoid
being any way concerned in reaping the unrighteous profits arising
from the iniquitous practise of dealing in Negro or other slaves;
whereby in the original purchase one man selleth another as he does the
beasts that perish without any better pretension to a property in him
than that of superior force, in direct violation of the Gospel rule,
which teacheth all to do as they would be done by and to do good to
all, being the reverse of that covetous disposition which furnisheth
encouragement to these poor, ignorant people to perpetuate their savage
wars, in order to supply the demands of this most unnatural traffic,
by which great numbers of mankind, free by nature, are subject to
inextricable bondage, and which hath often been observed to fill their
possessors with haughtiness, tyranny, luxury and barbarity, corrupting
the minds and debasing the morals of their children, to the unspeakable
prejudice of religion and virtue and the exclusion of that holy spirit
of universal love, meekness and charity which is the unchangable nature
and the glory of true Christianity. We therefore can do no less than,
with the greatest earnestness, impress it upon Friends everywhere that
they endeavor to keep their hands clean of this unrighteous gain of
oppression.”
I read and gave the paper back. “It is enwound in every civilized
country with commerce and revenue and private interest, ambition,
pride and gain. It is like back and front--I don’t know the thunderbolt
that will split them!”
“Yet God will launch it,” he answered and put up the paper and said no
more at all upon this subject. Nor did he question me upon conditions
at My Fancy, but put the whole aside and turned, it seemed to me, in a
strange and intimate fashion, to the inner plains and keeps, mountains,
tarns and sea of David Scott. At first, moving from the house toward
the high road, we moved in silence. The night was quiet and beautiful
with a half-moon riding high, and golden Venus in a west still flushed
with color. We heard the sea and the forever-ever slight rustle of
cane and frond. We walked in silence, he with his bundle and stick,
and with his thoughts, whatever they might be; I with mine. I say that
and yet, strangely then to me, still we seemed to be conversing. We
walked so to the great cotton tree and stepped upon the gleaming coast
road that should take him to the town. Across from it ran the thin belt
of sea grape and cocoanuts and the white sand and the blue water. I
said, “Let us go through and look at the sea.” He nodded agreement and
presently came upon the beach. Before us streamed and flowed and held
the enormous sea.
_This ae night, this ae night.
Every night and alle._
I said, “There’s a slave ship that I am upon--beneath the gratings, in
thick hot darkness, with All That Is pressed against me.--It’s not the
_Janet_, and this is not the sea, and color of the skin does not
come into it.--I was there at times in Virginia where I was a bought
servant. I think I may have been there at moments when, so young a
man, I lay in prison in Edinburgh. But I was there, too, when I ranged
free. Then it was at moments, but now almost all the time. And if I
were in London or Paris or home in Scotland, it would be the same. If I
had never come upon the _Janet_, or seen Daga on the Slave Coast;
if I had hardly seen a Negro or a formally named slave in my life; if
I thought not of them, if I were lawyer or schoolmaster or tenant or
laird, all now would be the same. There is a Great Ship of slaves, and
slaves are in the shrouds and on the poop deck, and I am a slave in the
depths of the ship.”
“Aye, aye,” he said. “Aye, aye! Such is the perception and the
emotion--and neither do I speak of physical enslavement, though that is
of it, too.”
He stood leaning on his staff, his bright eyes upon the sea. “David,
the slave both cannot and must free himself, and there is your
paradox----”
I laughed and it was dreary and mocking laughter.
“To find in the dark, without fingers, a catch or spring that may or
may not be there--there being everywhere!”
“That is just it,” he answered quietly. “There is everywhere.”
“I am tired of riddles that are never answered.”
“Never is a long word.”
He turned upon me in the moonlight, with the voice of the sea about us.
“You cannot be helped further at this time. But I say unto you, You
will find the way.”
With that he turned from the sea back to the road, and presently I
parted with him, and have never, with my bodily eyes, seen him since.
With the other eyes I have.