party of ladies and gentlemen who had been spending the evening over
cards and anisette. They did not notice Tante Cat’rinette almost
effacing herself against the black wall of the cathedral. She breathed
freely and ventured from her retreat only when they had disappeared from
view. Once a man saw her quite plainly, as she darted across a narrow
strip of moonlight. But Tante Cat’rinette need not have gasped with
fright as she did. He was too drunk to know if she were a thing of
flesh, or only one of the fantastic, maddening shadows that the moon was
casting across his path to bewilder him. When she reached the outskirts
of the town, and had to cross the broad piece of open country which
stretched out toward the pine wood, an almost paralyzing terror came
over her. But she crouched low, and hurried through the marsh and weeds,
avoiding the open road. She could have been mistaken for one of the
beasts browsing there where she passed.
But once in the Grand Ecore road that lay through the pine wood, she
felt secure and free to move as she pleased. Tante Cat’rinette
straightened herself, stiffened herself in fact, and unconsciously
assuming the attitude of the professional sprinter, she sped rapidly
beneath the Gothic interlacing branches of the pines. She talked
constantly to herself as she went, and to the animate and inanimate
objects around her. But her speech, far from intelligent, was hardly
intelligible.
She addressed herself to the moon, which she apostrophized as an
impertinent busybody spying upon her actions. She pictured all manner of
troublesome animals, snakes, rabbits, frogs, pursuing her, but she
defied them to catch Cat’rinette, who was hurrying toward Miss Kitty.
“Pa capab trapé Cat’rinette, vouzot; mo pé couri vite coté Miss Kitty.”
She called up to a mocking-bird warbling upon a lofty limb of a pine
tree, asking why it cried out so, and threatening to secure it and put
it into a cage. “Ca to pé crié comme ça, ti céléra? Arete, mo trapé
zozos la, mo mété li dan ain bon lacage.” Indeed, Tante Cat’rinette
seemed on very familiar terms with the night, with the forest, and with
all the flying, creeping, crawling things that inhabit it. At the speed
with which she traveled she soon had covered the few miles of wooded
road, and before long had reached her destination.
The sleeping-room of Miss Kitty opened upon the long outside gallery, as
did all the rooms of the unpretentious frame house which was her home.
The place could hardly be called a plantation; it was too small for
that. Nevertheless Raymond was trying to plant; trying to teach school
between times, in the end room; and sometimes, when he found himself in
a tight place, trying to clerk for Mr. Jacobs over in Campte, across Red
River.
Tante Cat’rinette mounted the creaking steps, crossed the gallery, and
entered Miss Kitty’s room as though she were returning to it after a few
moments’ absence. There was a lamp burning dimly upon the high
mantelpiece. Raymond had evidently not been to bed; he was in shirt
sleeves, rocking the baby’s cradle. It was the same mahogany cradle
which had held Miss Kitty thirty-five years before, when Tante
Cat’rinette had rocked it. The cradle had been bought then to match the
bed,—that big, beautiful bed on which Miss Kitty lay now in a restless
half slumber. There was a fine French clock on the mantel, still telling
the hours as it had told them years ago. But there were no carpets or
rugs on the floors. There was no servant in the house.
Raymond uttered an exclamation of amazement when he saw Tante
Cat’rinette enter.
“How you do, Miché Raymond?” she said, quietly. “I yeard Miss Kitty been
sick; Eusèbe tell me dat dis mo’nin’.”
She moved toward the bed as lightly as though shod with velvet, and
seated herself there. Miss Kitty’s hand lay outside the coverlid; a
shapely hand, which her few days of illness and rest had not yet
softened. The negress laid her own black hand upon it. At the touch Miss
Kitty instinctively turned her palm upward.
“It’s Tante Cat’rinette!” she exclaimed, with a note of satisfaction in
her feeble voice. “W’en did you come, Tante Cat’rinette? They all said
you wouldn’ come.”
“I’m goin’ come ev’y night, cher coeur, ev’y night tell you be well.
Tante Cat’rinette can’t come daytime no mo’.”
“Raymond tole me about it. They doin’ you mighty mean in town, Tante
Cat’rinette.”
“Nev’ mine, ti chou. I know how take care dat w’at Vieumaite gi’ me. You
go sleep now. Cat’rinette goin’ set yere an’ mine you. She goin’ make
you well like she all time do. We don’ wan’ no céléra doctor. We drive
’em out wid a stick, dey come roun’ yere.”
Miss Kitty was soon sleeping more restfully than she had done since her
illness began. Raymond had finally succeeded in quieting the baby, and
he tiptoed into the adjoining room, where the other children lay, to
snatch a few hours of much-needed rest for himself. Cat’rinette sat
faithfully beside her charge, administering at intervals to the sick
woman’s wants.
But the thought of regaining her home before daybreak, and of the urgent
necessity for doing so, did not leave Tante Cat’rinette’s mind for an
instant.
In the profound darkness, the deep stillness of the night that comes
before dawn, she was walking again through the woods, on her way back to
town.
The mocking-birds were asleep, and so were the frogs and the snakes; and
the moon was gone, and so was the breeze. She walked now in utter
silence but for the heavy guttural breathing that accompanied her rapid
footsteps. She walked with a desperate determination along the road,
every foot of which was familiar to her.
When she at last emerged from the woods, the earth about her was
faintly, very faintly, beginning to reveal itself in the tremulous,
gray, uncertain light of approaching day. She staggered and plunged
onward with beating pulses quickened by fear.
A sudden turn, and Tante Cat’rinette stood facing the river. She stopped
abruptly, as if at command of some unseen power that forced her. For an
instant she pressed a black hand against her tired, burning eyes, and
stared fixedly ahead of her.
Tante Cat’rinette had always believed that Paradise was up there
overhead where the sun and stars and moon are, and that “Vieumaite”
inhabited that region of splendor. She never for a moment doubted this.
It would be difficult, perhaps unsatisfying, to explain why Tante
Cat’rinette, on that particular morning, when a vision of the rising day
broke suddenly upon her, should have believed that she stood in face of
a heavenly revelation. But why not, after all? Since she talked so
familiarly herself to the unseen, why should it not respond to her when
the time came?
Across the narrow, quivering line of water, the delicate budding
branches of young trees were limned black against the gold, orange,—what
word is there to tell the color of that morning sky! And steeped in the
splendor of it hung one pale star; there was not another in the whole
heaven.
Tante Cat’rinette stood with her eyes fixed intently upon that star,
which held her like a hypnotic spell. She stammered breathlessly:
“Mo pé couté, Vieumaite. Cat’rinette pé couté.” (I am listening,
Vieumaite. Cat’rinette hears you.)
She stayed there motionless upon the brink of the river till the star
melted into the brightness of the day and became part of it.
When Tante Cat’rinette entered Miss Kitty’s room for the second time,
the aspect of things had changed somewhat. Miss Kitty was with much
difficulty holding the baby while Raymond mixed a saucer of food for the
little one. Their oldest daughter, a child of twelve, had come into the
room with an apronful of chips from the woodpile, and was striving to
start a fire on the hearth, to make the morning coffee. The room seemed
bare and almost squalid in the daylight.
“Well, yere Tante Cat’rinette come back,” she said, quietly announcing
herself.
They could not well understand why she was back; but it was good to have
her there, and they did not question.
She took the baby from its mother, and, seating herself, began to feed
it from the saucer which Raymond placed beside her on a chair.
“Yas,” she said, “Cat’rinette goin’ stay; dis time she en’t nev’ goin’
’way no mo’.”
Husband and wife looked at each other with surprised, questioning eyes.
“Miché Raymond,” remarked the woman, turning her head up to him with a
certain comical shrewdness in her glance, “if somebody want len’ you
t’ousan’ dolla’, w’at you goin’ say? Even if it’s ole nigga ’oman?”
The man’s face flushed with sudden emotion. “I would say that person was
our bes’ frien’, Tante Cat’rinette. An’,” he added, with a smile, “I
would give her a mortgage on the place, of co’se, to secu’ her f’om
loss.”
“Das right,” agreed the woman practically. “Den Cat’rinette goin’ len’
you t’ousan’ dolla’. Dat w’at Vieumaite give her, dat b’long to her;
don’ b’long to nobody else. An’ we go yon’a to town, Miché Raymond, you
an’ me. You care me befo’ Miché Paxtone. I want ’im fo’ put down in
writin’ befo’ de cote dat w’at Cat’rinette got, it fo’ Miss Kitty w’en I
be dead.”
Miss Kitty was crying softly in the depths of her pillow.
“I en’t got no head fo’ all dat, me,” laughed Tante Cat’rinette, good
humoredly, as she held a spoonful of pap up to the baby’s eager lips.
“It’s Vieumaite tell me all dat clair an’ plain dis mo’nin’, w’en I
comin’ ’long de Gran’ Eco’ road.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Respectable Woman
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Respectable Woman
[Illustration]
Mrs. Baroda was a little provoked to learn that her husband expected his
friend, Gouvernail, up to spend a week or two on the plantation.
They had entertained a good deal during the winter; much of the time had
also been passed in New Orleans in various forms of mild dissipation.
She was looking forward to a period of unbroken rest, now, and
undisturbed tête-a-tête with her husband, when he informed her that
Gouvernail was coming up to stay a week or two.
This was a man she had heard much of but never seen. He had been her
husband’s college friend; was now a journalist, and in no sense a
society man or “a man about town,” which were, perhaps, some of the
reasons she had never met him. But she had unconsciously formed an image
of him in her mind. She pictured him tall, slim, cynical; with
eye-glasses, and his hands in his pockets; and she did not like him.
Gouvernail was slim enough, but he wasn’t very tall nor very cynical;
neither did he wear eye-glasses nor carry his hands in his pockets. And
she rather liked him when he first presented himself.
But why she liked him she could not explain satisfactorily to herself
when she partly attempted to do so. She could discover in him none of
those brilliant and promising traits which Gaston, her husband, had
often assured her that he possessed. On the contrary, he sat rather mute
and receptive before her chatty eagerness to make him feel at home and
in face of Gaston’s frank and wordy hospitality. His manner was as
courteous toward her as the most exacting woman could require; but he
made no direct appeal to her approval or even esteem.
Once settled at the plantation he seemed to like to sit upon the wide
portico in the shade of one of the big Corinthian pillars, smoking his
cigar lazily and listening attentively to Gaston’s experience as a sugar
planter.
“This is what I call living,” he would utter with deep satisfaction, as
the air that swept across the sugar field caressed him with its warm and
scented velvety touch. It pleased him also to get on familiar terms with
the big dogs that came about him, rubbing themselves sociably against
his legs. He did not care to fish, and displayed no eagerness to go out
and kill grosbecs when Gaston proposed doing so.
Gouvernail’s personality puzzled Mrs. Baroda, but she liked him. Indeed,
he was a lovable, inoffensive fellow. After a few days, when she could
understand him no better than at first, she gave over being puzzled and
remained piqued. In this mood she left her husband and her guest, for
the most part, alone together. Then finding that Gouvernail took no
manner of exception to her action, she imposed her society upon him,
accompanying him in his idle strolls to the mill and walks along the
batture. She persistently sought to penetrate the reserve in which he
had unconsciously enveloped himself.
“When is he going—your friend?” she one day asked her husband. “For my
part, he tires me frightfully.”
“Not for a week yet, dear. I can’t understand; he gives you no trouble.”
“No. I should like him better if he did; if he were more like others,
and I had to plan somewhat for his comfort and enjoyment.”
Gaston took his wife’s pretty face between his hands and looked tenderly
and laughingly into her troubled eyes. They were making a bit of toilet
sociably together in Mrs. Baroda’s dressing-room.
“You are full of surprises, ma belle,” he said to her. “Even I can never
count upon how you are going to act under given conditions.” He kissed
her and turned to fasten his cravat before the mirror.
“Here you are,” he went on, “taking poor Gouvernail seriously and making
a commotion over him, the last thing he would desire or expect.”
“Commotion!” she hotly resented. “Nonsense! How can you say such a
thing? Commotion, indeed! But, you know, you said he was clever.”
“So he is. But the poor fellow is run down by overwork now. That’s why I
asked him here to take a rest.”
“You used to say he was a man of ideas,” she retorted, unconciliated. “I
expected him to be interesting, at least. I’m going to the city in the
morning to have my spring gowns fitted. Let me know when Mr. Gouvernail
is gone; I shall be at my Aunt Octavie’s.”
That night she went and sat alone upon a bench that stood beneath a live
oak tree at the edge of the gravel walk.
She had never known her thoughts or her intentions to be so confused.
She could gather nothing from them but the feeling of a distinct
necessity to quit her home in the morning.
Mrs. Baroda heard footsteps crunching the gravel; but could discern in
the darkness only the approaching red point of a lighted cigar. She knew
it was Gouvernail, for her husband did not smoke. She hoped to remain
unnoticed, but her white gown revealed her to him. He threw away his
cigar and seated himself upon the bench beside her; without a suspicion
that she might object to his presence.
“Your husband told me to bring this to you, Mrs. Baroda,” he said,
handing her a filmy, white scarf with which she sometimes enveloped her
head and shoulders. She accepted the scarf from him with a murmur of
thanks, and let it lie in her lap.
He made some commonplace observation upon the baneful effect of the
night air at that season. Then as his gaze reached out into the
darkness, he murmured, half to himself:
“‘Night of south winds—night of the large few stars!
Still nodding night——’”
She made no reply to this apostrophe to the night, which indeed, was not
addressed to her.
Gouvernail was in no sense a diffident man, for he was not a
self-conscious one. His periods of reserve were not constitutional, but
the result of moods. Sitting there beside Mrs. Baroda, his silence
melted for the time.
He talked freely and intimately in a low, hesitating drawl that was not
unpleasant to hear. He talked of the old college days when he and Gaston
had been a good deal to each other; of the days of keen and blind
ambitions and large intentions. Now there was left with him, at least, a
philosophic acquiescence to the existing order—only a desire to be
permitted to exist, with now and then a little whiff of genuine life,
such as he was breathing now.
Her mind only vaguely grasped what he was saying. Her physical being was
for the moment predominant. She was not thinking of his words, only
drinking in the tones of his voice. She wanted to reach out her hand in
the darkness and touch him with the sensitive tips of her fingers upon
the face or the lips. She wanted to draw close to him and whisper
against his cheek—she did not care what—as she might have done if she
had not been a respectable woman.
The stronger the impulse grew to bring herself near him, the further, in
fact, did she draw away from him. As soon as she could do so without an
appearance of too great rudeness, she rose and left him there alone.
Before she reached the house, Gouvernail had lighted a fresh cigar and
ended his apostrophe to the night.
Mrs. Baroda was greatly tempted that night to tell her husband—who was
also her friend—of this folly that had seized her. But she did not yield
to the temptation. Beside being a respectable woman she was a very
sensible one; and she knew there are some battles in life which a human
being must fight alone.
When Gaston arose in the morning, his wife had already departed. She had
taken an early morning train to the city. She did not return till
Gouvernail was gone from under her roof.
There was some talk of having him back during the summer that followed.
That is, Gaston greatly desired it; but this desire yielded to his
wife’s strenuous opposition.
However, before the year ended, she proposed, wholly from herself, to
have Gouvernail visit them again. Her husband was surprised and
delighted with the suggestion coming from her.
“I am glad, chère amie, to know that you have finally overcome your
dislike for him; truly he did not deserve it.”
“Oh,” she told him, laughingly, after pressing a long, tender kiss upon
his lips, “I have overcome everything! you will see. This time I shall
be very nice to him.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ripe Figs
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ripe Figs
[Illustration]
Maman-Nainaine said that when the figs were ripe Babette might go to
visit her cousins down on the Bayou-Lafourche where the sugar cane
grows. Not that the ripening of figs had the least thing to do with it,
but that is the way Maman-Nainaine was.
It seemed to Babette a very long time to wait; for the leaves upon the
trees were tender yet, and the figs were like little hard, green
marbles.
But warm rains came along and plenty of strong sunshine, and though
Maman-Nainaine was as patient as the statue of la Madone, and Babette as
restless as a humming-bird, the first thing they both knew it was hot
summer-time. Every day Babette danced out to where the fig-trees were in
a long line against the fence. She walked slowly beneath them, carefully
peering between the gnarled, spreading branches. But each time she came
disconsolate away again. What she saw there finally was something that
made her sing and dance the whole long day.
When Maman-Nainaine sat down in her stately way to breakfast, the
following morning, her muslin cap standing like an aureole about her
white, placid face, Babette approached. She bore a dainty porcelain
platter, which she set down before her godmother. It contained a dozen
purple figs, fringed around with their rich, green leaves.
“Ah,” said Maman-Nainaine, arching her eyebrows, “how early the figs
have ripened this year!”
“Oh,” said Babette, “I think they have ripened very late.”
“Babette,” continued Maman-Nainaine, as she peeled the very plumpest
figs with her pointed silver fruit-knife, “you will carry my love to
them all down on Bayou-Lafourche. And tell your Tante Frosine I shall
look for her at Toussaint—when the chrysanthemums are in bloom.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ozème’s Holiday
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ozème’s Holiday
[Illustration]
Ozème often wondered why there was not a special dispensation of
providence to do away with the necessity for work. There seemed to him
so much created for man’s enjoyment in this world, and so little time
and opportunity to profit by it. To sit and do nothing but breathe was a
pleasure to Ozème; but to sit in the company of a few choice companions,
including a sprinkling of ladies, was even a greater delight; and the
joy which a day’s hunting or fishing or picnicking afforded him is
hardly to be described. Yet he was by no means indolent. He worked
faithfully on the plantation the whole year long, in a sort of
methodical way; but when the time came around for his annual week’s
holiday, there was no holding him back. It was often decidedly
inconvenient for the planter that Ozème usually chose to take his
holiday during some very busy season of the year.
He started out one morning in the beginning of October. He had borrowed
Mr. Laballière’s buckboard and Padue’s old gray mare, and a harness from
the negro Sévérin. He wore a light blue suit which had been sent all the
way from St. Louis, and which had cost him ten dollars; he had paid
almost as much again for his boots; and his hat was a broad-rimmed gray
felt which he had no cause to be ashamed of. When Ozème went “broading,”
he dressed—well, regardless of cost. His eyes were blue and mild; his
hair was light, and he wore it rather long; he was clean shaven, and
really did not look his thirty-five years.
Ozème had laid his plans weeks beforehand. He was going visiting along
Cane River; the mere contemplation filled him with pleasure. He counted
upon reaching Fédeaus’ about noon, and he would stop and dine there.
Perhaps they would ask him to stay all night. He really did not hold to
staying all night, and was not decided to accept if they did ask him.
There were only the two old people, and he rather fancied the notion of
pushing on to Beltrans’, where he would stay a night, or even two, if
urged. He was quite sure that there would be something agreeable going
on at Beltrans’, with all those young people—perhaps a fish-fry, or
possibly a ball!
Of course he would have to give a day to Tante Sophie and another to
Cousine Victoire; but none to the St. Annes unless entreated—after St.
Anne reproaching him last year with being a fainéant for broading at
such a season! At Cloutierville, where he would linger as long as
possible, he meant to turn and retrace his course, zigzagging back and
forth across Cane River so as to take in the Duplans, the Velcours, and
others that he could not at the moment recall. A week seemed to Ozème a
very, very little while in which to crowd so much pleasure.
There were steam-gins at work; he could hear them whistling far and
near. On both sides of the river the fields were white with cotton, and
everybody in the world seemed busy but Ozème. This reflection did not
distress or disturb him in the least; he pursued his way at peace with
himself and his surroundings.
At Lamérie’s cross-roads store, where he stopped to buy a cigar, he
learned that there was no use heading for Fédeaus’, as the two old
people had gone to town for a lengthy visit, and the house was locked
up. It was at Fédeaus’ that Ozème had intended to dine.
He sat in the buckboard, given up to a moment or two of reflection. The
result was that he turned away from the river, and entered the road that
led between two fields back to the woods and into the heart of the
country. He had determined upon taking a short cut to the Beltrans’
plantation, and on the way he meant to keep an eye open for old Aunt
Tildy’s cabin, which he knew lay in some remote part of this cut-off. He
remembered that Aunt Tildy could cook an excellent meal if she had the
material at hand. He would induce her to fry him a chicken, drip a cup
of coffee, and turn him out a pone of corn-bread, which he thought would
be sumptuous enough fare for the occasion.
Aunt Tildy dwelt in the not unusual log cabin, of one room, with its
chimney of mud and stone, and its shallow gallery formed by the jutting
of the roof. In close proximity to the cabin was a small cotton-field,
which from a long distance looked like a field of snow. The cotton was
bursting and overflowing foam-like from bolls on the drying stalk. On
the lower branches it was hanging ragged and tattered, and much of it
had already fallen to the ground. There were a few chinaberry-trees in
the yard before the hut, and under one of them an ancient and
rusty-looking mule was eating corn from a wood trough. Some common
little Creole chickens were scratching about the mule’s feet and
snatching at the grains of corn that occasionally fell from the trough.
Aunt Tildy was hobbling across the yard when Ozème drew up before the
gate. One hand was confined in a sling; in the other she carried a tin
pan, which she let fall noisily to the ground when she recognized him.
She was broad, black, and misshapen, with her body bent forward almost
at an acute angle. She wore a blue cottonade of large plaids, and a
bandana awkwardly twisted around her head.
“Good God A’mighty, man! Whar you come from?” was her startled
exclamation at beholding him.
“F’om home, Aunt Tildy; w’ere else do you expec’?” replied Ozème,
dismounting composedly.