Louisiana Anthology
Grace King.
Balcony Stories.
BALCONY STORIES
BY
GRACE KING
AUTHOR OF “TALES OF A TIME AND PLACE”
AUTHOR’S EDITION
NEW ORLEANS
THE L. GRAHAM CO., LTD.
1914
Copyright 1914 by
GRACE KING
THE GRAHAM PRESS
TO MY MOTHER
WHOSE BALCONY STORIES WERE THE DELIGHT
OF MY CHILDHOOD, THESE FEEBLE IMITATIONS
ARE GRATEFULLY AND LOVINGLY DEDICATED
CONTENTS
- THE BALCONY . . . .1
-
A DRAMA OF THREE . . . .5
-
LA GRANDE DEMOISELLE . . . .21
-
MIMI’S MARRIAGE . . . .37
-
THE MIRACLE CHAPEL . . . .55
-
THE STORY OF A DAY . . . .67
-
ANNE MARIE AND JEANNE MARIE . . . .89
-
A CRIPPLED HOPE . . . .103
-
“ONE OF US“ . . . .125
-
THE LITTLE CONVENT GIRL . . . .141
-
GRANDMOTHER’S GRANDMOTHER . . . .163
-
THE OLD LADY’S RESTORATION . . . .175
-
A DELICATE AFFAIR . . . .191
-
PUPASSE . . . .221
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
-
“WALKING AWAY WITH A SHRUG OF THE SHOULDERS”. . . .
Frontispiece
-
“WHERE IS THAT IDIOT, THAT DOLT, THAT SLUGGARD,
THAT SNAIL, WITH MY MAIL?” . . . .11
- CHAMPIGNY . . . .33
-
“I WEPT, I WEPT, I WEPT” . . . .
51
-
“HER HEART DROVE HER TO THE WINDOW” . . . .
81
-
“ALL THAT DAY WAS DESPONDENCY, DEJECTION” . . . .
85
-
“THIS TIME WE HAVE CAUGHT IT!” . . . .
97
-
“THE QUIET, DIM-LIGHTED ROOM OF A CONVALESCENT” . . . .
107
-
“LITTLE MAMMY” . . . .109
- “TO POSE IN ABJECT PATIENCE AND AWKWARDNESS”. . . .
129
-
THE SISTERS BID HER GOOD-BY . . . .145
-
WATCHING A LANDING . . . .150
-
“TURNED TO HER DOMESTIC DUTIES” . . . .
169
-
THE ROOM IN THE OLD GALLERY . . . .
185
-
THE FIRST COMMUNION . . . .239
BALCONY STORIES
THE BALCONY
THERE
is much of life passed on the
balcony in a country where the summer
unrolls in six moon-lengths, and where the
nights have to come with a double endowment
of vastness and splendor to compensate
for the tedious, sun-parched days.
And in that country the women love to sit
and talk together of summer nights, on
balconies, in their vague, loose, white garments, —
men are not balcony sitters, — with their
sleeping children within easy hearing, the stars
breaking the cool darkness, or the moon
making a show of light — oh, such a discreet
show of light! — through the vines. And the
children inside, waking to go from one sleep
into another, hear the low, soft mother-voices
on the balcony, talking about this person and
that, old times, old friends, old experiences;
and it seems to them, hovering a moment in
wakefulness, that there is no end of the world
or time, or of the mother-knowledge; but,
illimitable as it is, the mother-voices and the
mother-love and protection fill it all, — with
their mother’s hand in theirs, children are not
afraid even of God, — and they drift into slumber
again, their little dreams taking all kinds
of pretty reflections from the great unknown
horizon outside, as their fragile soap-bubbles
take on reflections from the sun and clouds.
Experiences, reminiscences, episodes, picked
up as only women know how to pick them up
from other women’s lives, — or other women’s
destinies, as they prefer to call them, — and told
as only women know how to relate them;
what God has done or is doing with some
other woman whom they have known — that
is what interests women once embarked on
their own lives, — the embarkation takes place
at marriage, or after the marriageable time, —
or, rather, that is what interests the women
who sit of summer nights on balconies. For
in those long-moon countries life is open and
accessible, and romances seem to be furnished
real and gratis, in order to save, in a
languor-breeding climate, the ennui of reading and
writing books. Each woman has a different
way of picking up and relating her stories, as
each one selects different pieces, and has a
personal way of playing them on the piano.
Each story is
different, or appears so to her;
each has some unique and peculiar pathos in
it. And so she dramatizes and inflects it, trying
to make the point visible to her apparent
also to her hearers. Sometimes the pathos
and interest to the hearers lie only in this —
that the relater has observed it, and gathered
it, and finds it worth telling. For do we not
gather what we have not, and is not our own
lacking our one motive? It may be so, for it
often appears so.
And if a child inside be wakeful and precocious,
it is not dreams alone that take on reflections
from the balcony outside: through
the half-open shutters the still, quiet eyes look
across the dim forms on the balcony to the
star-spangled or the moon-brightened heavens
beyond; while memory makes stores for the
future, and germs are sown, out of which the
slow, clambering vine of thought issues, one
day, to decorate or hide, as it may be, the
structures or ruins of life.
A DRAMA OF THREE
IT
was a regular dramatic performance
every first of the month in the little
cottage of the old General and Madame B——.
It began with the waking up of the General
by his wife, standing at the bedside with a cup
of black coffee.
“Hé! Ah! Oh, Honorine! Yes; the first
of the month, and affairs — affairs to be
transacted.“
On those mornings when affairs were to be
transacted there was not much leisure for the
household; and it was Honorine who constituted
the household. Not the old dressing-gown
and slippers, the old, old trousers, and
the antediluvian
neck-foulard
of other days!
Far from it. It was a case of warm water
with even a fling of cologne in it), of the
trimming of beard and mustache by Honorine,
and the black broadcloth suit, and the brown
satin stock, and that
je ne sais quoi de dégagé
which no one could possess or assume like the
old General. Whether he possessed or assumed
it is an uncertainty which hung over
the fine manners of all the gentlemen of his
day, who were kept through their youth in
Paris to cultivate
bon ton
and an education.
It was also something of a gala-day for
Madame la Générale too, as it must be a
gala-day for all old wives to see their
husbands pranked in the manners and graces
that had conquered their maidenhood, and
exhaling once more that ambrosial fragrance
which once so well incensed their compelling
presence.
Ah, to the end a woman loves to celebrate
her conquest! It is the last touch of misfortune
with her to lose in the old, the ugly, and
the commonplace her youthful lord and master.
If one could look under the gray hairs
and wrinkles with which time thatches old
women, one would be surprised to see the
flutterings, the quiverings, the thrills, the
emotions, the coals of the heart-fires which
death alone extinguishes, when he commands
the tenant to vacate.
Honorine’s hands chilled with the ice of
sixteen as she approached scissors to the
white mustache and beard. When her finger-tips
brushed those lips, still well formed
and roseate, she felt it, strange to say, on her
lips. When she asperged the warm water
with cologne, — it was her secret delight and
greatest effort of economy to buy this cologne,
— she always had one little moment of
what she called faintness — that faintness
which had veiled her eyes, and chained her
hands, and stilled her throbbing bosom, when
as a bride she came from the church with him.
It was then she noticed the faint fragrance of
the cologne bath. Her lips would open as
they did then, and she would stand for a moment
and think thoughts to which, it must
be confessed, she looked forward from month
to month. What a man he had been! In
truth he belonged to a period that would
accept nothing less from Nature than physical
beauty; and Nature is ever subservient to
the period. If it is to-day all small men,
and to-morrow gnomes and dwarfs, we may
know that the period is demanding them from
Nature.
When the General had completed — let it
be called no less than the ceremony of —
his toilet, he took his chocolate and his
pain de Paris.
Honorine could not imagine
him breakfasting on anything but
pain de Paris. Then
he sat himself in his large
armchair before his
escritoire,
and began
transacting his affairs with the usual —
“But where is that idiot, that dolt, that
sluggard, that snail, with my mail?”
Honorine, busy in the breakfast-room:
“In a moment, husband. In a moment.”
“But he should be here now. It is the
first of the month, it is nine o’clock, I am
ready; he should be here.”
“It is not yet nine o’clock, husband.”
“Not yet nine! Not yet nine! Am I
not up? Am I not dressed? Have I not
breakfasted before nine?”
“That is so, husband. That is so.”
Honorine’s voice, prompt in cheerful
acquiescence, came from the next room, where
she was washing his cup, saucer, and spoon.
“It is getting worse and worse every day.
I tell you, Honorine, Pompey must be
discharged. He is worthless. He is trifling.
Discharge him! Discharge him! Do not
have him about! Chase him out of the
yard! Chase him as soon as he makes his
appearance! Do you hear, Honorine?”
“You must have a little patience, husband.”
It was perhaps the only reproach one could
make to Madame Honorine, that she never
learned by experience.
“Patience! Patience! Patience is the
invention of dullards and sluggards. In a
well-regulated world there should be no need
of such a thing as patience. Patience should
be punished as a crime, or at least as a
breach of the peace. Wherever patience
is found police investigation should be made
as for smallpox. Patience! Patience! I
never heard the word — I assure you, I
never heard the word in Paris. What do
you think would be said there to the
messenger who craved patience of you? Oh,
they know too well in Paris — a rataplan
from the walking-stick on his back, that
would be the answer; and a, ‘My good
fellow, we are not hiring professors of
patience, but legs.’”
“But, husband, you must remember we do
not hire Pompey. He only does it to oblige
us, out of his kindness.”
“Oblige us! Oblige me! Kindness! A
negro oblige me! Kind to me! That is it;
that is it. That is the way to talk under the
new régime. It is favor, and oblige, and
education, and monsieur, and madame, now. What
child’s play to call this a country — a
government! I would not be surprised” — jumping
to his next position on this ever-recurring first
of the month theme — “I would not be surprised
if Pompey has failed to find the letter
in the box. How do I know that the mail
has not been tampered with? From day to
day I expect to hear it. What is to prevent?
Who is to interpose? The honesty of the officials?
Honesty of the officials — that is good!
What a farce — honesty of officials! That is
evidently what has happened. The thought
has not occurred to me in vain. Pompey has
gone. He has not found the letter, and —
well; that is the end.”
But the General had still another theory to
account for the delay in the appearance of his
mail which he always posed abruptly after the
exhaustion of the arraignment of the post-office.
“And why not Journel?” Journel was their
landlord, a fellow of means, but no extraction,
and a favorite aversion of the old gentleman’s.
“Journel himself? you think he is above it,
hé? You think Journel would not do such a
thing? Ha! your simplicity, Honorine — your
simplicity is incredible. It is miraculous. I
tell you, I have known the Journels, from
father to son, for — yes, for seventy-five years.
Was not his grandfather the overseer on my
father’s plantation? I was not five years old
when I began to know the Journels. And
this fellow, I know him better than he knows
himself. I know him as well as God knows
him. I have made up my mind. I have made
it up carefully that the first time that letter
fails on the first of the month I shall have
Journel arrested as a thief. I shall land him
in the penitentiary. What! You think I shall
submit to have my mail tampered with by a
Journel? Their contents appropriated? What!
You think there was no coincidence in Journel’s
offering me his post-office box just the
month — just the month, before those letters
began to arrive? You think he did not have
some inkling of them? Mark my words,
Honorine, he did — by some of his subterranean
methods. And all these five years he
has been arranging his plans — that is all.
He was arranging theft, which no doubt has
been consummated to-day. Oh, I have regretted
it — I assure you I have regretted it,
that I did not promptly reject his proposition,
that, in fact, I ever had anything to do with
the fellow.”
It was almost invariably, so regularly do
events run in this world, — it was almost
invariably that the negro messenger made his
appearance at this point. For five years the
General had perhaps not been interrupted as
many times, either above or below the last
sentence. The mail, or rather the letter, was
opened, and the usual amount — three ten-dollar
bills — was carefully extracted and
counted. And as if he scented the bills, even
as the General said he did, within ten minutes
after their delivery, Journel made his
appearance to collect the rent.
It could only have been in Paris, among
that old retired nobility, who counted their
names back, as they expressed it,
“au de ça du déluge,”
that could have been acquired the
proper manner of treating a
“roturier”
landlord: to measure him with the eyes from
head to foot; to hand the rent — the ten-dollar
bill — with the tips of the fingers; to
scorn a look at the humbly tendered receipt;
to say: “The cistern needs repairing, the
roof leaks; I must warn you that unless such
notifications meet with more prompt attention
than in the past, you must look for another
tenant,” etc., in the monotonous tone of
supremacy, and in the French, not of Journel’s
dictionary, nor of the dictionary of any such
as he, but in the French of Racine and Corneille;
in the French of the above suggested
circle, which inclosed the General’s memory,
if it had not inclosed — as he never tired of
recounting — his star-like personality.
A sheet of paper always infolded the
bank-notes. It always bore, in fine but sexless
tracery, “From one who owes you
much.”
There, that was it, that sentence, which,
like a locomotive, bore the General and his
wife far on these firsts of the month to two
opposite points of the horizon, in fact, one
from the other — “From one who owes you
much.”
The old gentleman would toss the paper
aside with the bill receipt. In the man to
whom the bright New Orleans itself almost
owed its brightness, it was a paltry act to
search and pick for a debtor. Friends had
betrayed and deserted him; relatives had
forgotten him; merchants had failed with his
money; bank presidents had stooped to deceive
him; for he was an old man, and had
about run the gamut of human disappointments
— a gamut that had begun with a C
major of trust, hope, happiness, and money.
His political party had thrown him aside.
Neither for ambassador, plenipotentiary,
senator, congressman, not even for a clerkship,
could he be nominated by it.
Certes!
“From one who owed him much.” He had
fitted the cap to a new head, the first of
every month, for five years, and still the list
was not exhausted. Indeed, it would have
been hard for the General to look anywhere
and not see some one whose obligations to
him far exceeded this thirty dollars a month.
Could he avoid being happy with such eyes?
But poor Madame Honorine! She who
always gathered up the receipts, and the
“From one who owes you much”; who
could at an instant’s warning produce the
particular ones for any month of the past
half-decade. She kept them filed, not only
in her armoire, but the scrawled papers
— skewered, as it were, somewhere else —
where women from time immemorial have
skewered such unsigned papers. She was
not original in her thoughts — no more, for
the matter of that, than the General was.
Tapped at any time on the first of the month,
when she would pause in her drudgery to
reimpale her heart by a sight of the written
characters on the scrap of paper, her
thoughts would have been found flowing
thus, “One can give everything, and yet
be sure of nothing.”
When Madame Honorine said “everything,”
she did not, as women in such cases
often do, exaggerate. When she married
the General, she in reality gave the youth
of sixteen, the beauty (ah, do not trust the
denial of those wrinkles, the thin hair, the
faded eyes!) of an angel, the dot of an
heiress. Alas! It was too little at the
time. Had she in her own person united all
the youth, all the beauty, all the wealth,
sprinkled parsimoniously so far and wide
over all the women in this land, would she
at that time have done aught else with this
than immolate it on the burning pyre of the
General’s affection? “And yet be sure of
nothing.”
It is not necessary, perhaps, to explain that
last clause. It is very little consolation for
wives that their husbands have forgotten,
when some one else remembers. Some one
else! Ah! there could be so many some
one elses in the General’s life, for in truth
he had been irresistible to excess. But this
was one particular some one else who had
been faithful for five years. Which one?
When Madame Honorine solves that enigma
she has made up her mind how to act.
As for Journel, it amused him more and
more. He would go away from the little
cottage rubbing his hands with pleasure (he
never saw Madame Honorine, by the way,
only the General). He would have given
far more than thirty dollars a month for this
drama; for he was not only rich, but a great
farceur.
LA GRANDE DEMOISELLE
THAT
was what she was called by
everybody as soon as she was seen or
described. Her name, besides baptismal titles,
was Idalie Sainte Foy Mortemart des Islets.
When she came into society, in the brilliant
little world of New Orleans, it was the event
of the season, and after she came in, whatever
she did became also events. Whether
she went, or did not go; what she said, or
did not say; what she wore, and did not
wear — all these became important matters
of discussion, quoted as much or more than
what the president said, or the governor
thought. And in those days, the days of
’59, New Orleans was not, as it is now, a
one-heiress place, but it may be said that
one could find heiresses then as one finds
type-writing girls now.
Mademoiselle Idalie received her birth, and
what education she had, on her parents’
plantation, the famed old Reine Sainte Foy
place, and it is no secret that, like the
ancient kings of France, her birth exceeded her
education.
It was a plantation, the Reine Sainte Foy,
the richness and luxury of which are really
well described in those perfervid pictures of
tropical life, at one time the passion of
philanthropic imaginations, excited and exciting
over the horrors of slavery. Although these
pictures were then often accused of being
purposely exaggerated, they seem now to fall short
of, instead of surpassing, the truth. Stately
walls, acres of roses, miles of oranges, unmeasured
fields of cane, colossal sugar-house —
they were all there, and all the rest of it, with
the slaves, slaves, slaves everywhere, whole
villages of negro cabins. And there were
also, most noticeable to the natural, as well
as to the visionary, eye — there were the ease,
idleness, extravagance, self-indulgence, pomp,
pride, arrogance, in short the whole enumeration,
the moral
sine qua non,
as some people
considered it, of the wealthy slaveholder of
aristocratic descent and tastes.
What Mademoiselle Idalie cared to learn
she studied, what she did not she ignored;
and she followed the same simple rule untrammeled
in her eating, drinking, dressing, and
comportment generally; and whatever discipline
may have been exercised on the place,
either in fact or fiction, most assuredly none
of it, even so much as in a threat, ever
attainted her sacred person. When she was
just turned sixteen, Mademoiselle Idalie made
up her mind to go into society. Whether she
was beautiful or not, it is hard to say. It is
almost impossible to appreciate properly the
beauty of the rich, the very rich. The unfettered
development, the limitless choice of accessories,
the confidence, the self-esteem, the
sureness of expression, the simplicity of purpose,
the ease of execution — all these produce
a certain effect of beauty behind which one
really cannot get to measure length of nose,
or brilliancy of eye. This much can be said:
there was nothing in her that positively
contradicted any assumption of beauty on her
part, or credit of it on the part of others. She
was very tall and very thin with small head,
long neck, black eyes, and abundant straight
black hair, — for which her hair-dresser
deserved more praise than she, — good teeth, of
course, and a mouth that, even in prayer,
talked nothing but commands; that is about
all she had
en fait d’ornements,
as the
modistes
say. It may be added that she walked
as if the Reine Sainte Foy plantation extended
over the whole earth, and the soil of it were
too vile for her tread. Of course she did not
buy her toilets in New Orleans. Everything
was ordered from Paris, and came as regularly
through the custom-house as the modes
and robes to the milliners. She was furnished
by a certain house there, just as one of a royal
family would be at the present day. As this
had lasted from her layette up to her sixteenth
year, it may be imagined what took place
when she determined to make her début.
Then it was literally, not metaphorically,
carte
blanche, at least so it got
to the ears of society.
She took a sheet of note-paper, wrote the date
at the top, added, “I make my début in
November,” signed her name at the extreme end
of the sheet, addressed it to her dressmaker
in Paris, and sent it.
It was said that in her dresses the very
handsomest silks were used for linings, and
that real lace was used where others put
imitation, — around the bottoms of the skirts, for
instance, — and silk ribbons of the best quality
served the purposes of ordinary tapes;
and sometimes the buttons were of real gold
and silver, sometimes set with precious stones.
Not that she ordered these particulars, but
the dressmakers, when given
carte blanche by
those who do not condescend to details, so
soon exhaust the outside limits of garments
that perforce they take to plastering them
inside with gold, so to speak, and, when the
bill goes in, they depend upon the furnishings
to carry out a certain amount of the contract
in justifying the price. And it was said that
these costly dresses, after being worn once or
twice, were cast aside, thrown upon the floor,
given to the negroes — anything to get them
out of sight. Not an inch of the real lace,
not one of the jeweled buttons, not a scrap
of ribbon, was ripped off to save. And it was
said that if she wanted to romp with her dogs
in all her finery, she did it; she was known
to have ridden horseback, one moonlight
night, all around the plantation in a white
silk dinner-dress flounced with Alençon. And
at night, when she came from the balls, tired,
tired to death as only balls can render one,
she would throw herself down upon her bed
in her tulle skirts, — on top, or not, of the
exquisite flowers, she did not care, — and
make her maid undress her in that position;
often having her bodices cut off her, because
she was too tired to turn over and have them
unlaced.
That she was admired, raved about, loved
even, goes without saying. After the first
month she held the refusal of half the beaux
of New Orleans. Men did absurd, undignified,
preposterous things for her; and she?
Love? Marry? The idea never occurred to
her. She treated the most exquisite of her
pretenders no better than she treated her
Paris gowns, for the matter of that. She
could not even bring herself to listen to a
proposal patiently; whistling to her dogs, in
the middle of the most ardent protestations,
or jumping up and walking away with a shrug
of the shoulders, and a “Bah!”
Well! Every one knows what happened
after ’59. There is no need to repeat. The
history of one is the history of all. But there
was this difference — for there is every shade
of difference in misfortune, as there is every
shade of resemblance in happiness. Mortemart
des Islets went off to fight. That was
natural; his family had been doing that, he
thought, or said, ever since Charlemagne.
Just as naturally he was killed in the first
engagement. They, his family, were always
among the first killed; so much so that it
began to be considered assassination to fight
a duel with any of them. All that was in the
ordinary course of events. One difference in
their misfortunes lay in that after the city
was captured, their plantation, so near,
convenient, and rich in all kinds of provisions,
was selected to receive a contingent of troops
— a colored company. If it had been a colored
company raised in Louisiana it might
have been different; and these negroes mixed
with the negroes in the neighborhood, — and
negroes are no better than whites, for the
proportion of good and bad among them, —
and the officers were always off duty when
they should have been on, and on when they
should have been off.
One night the dwelling caught fire. There
was an immediate rush to save the ladies.
Oh, there was no hesitation about that! They
were seized in their beds, and carried out in
the very arms of their enemies; carried away
off to the sugar-house, and deposited there.
No danger of their doing anything but keep
very quiet and still in their
chemises de nuit,
and their one sheet apiece, which was about
all that was saved from the conflagration
that is, for them. But it must be remembered
that this is all hearsay. When one has not
been present, one knows nothing of one’s
own knowledge; one can only repeat. It
has been repeated, however, that although
the house was burned to the ground, and
everything in it destroyed, wherever, for a
year afterward, a man of that company or
of that neighborhood was found, there could
have been found also, without search-warrant,
property that had belonged to the Des Islets.
That is the story; and it is believed or not,
exactly according to prejudice.
How the ladies ever got out of the sugar-house,
history does not relate; nor what they
did. It was not a time for sociability, either
personal or epistolary. At one offensive word
your letter, and you, very likely, examined;
and Ship Island for a hotel, with soldiers for
hostesses! Madame Des Islets died very soon
after the accident — of rage, they say; and
that was about all the public knew.
Indeed, at that time the society of New
Orleans had other things to think about than
the fate of the Des Islets. As for
la grande demoiselle,
she had prepared for her own oblivion
in the hearts of her female friends. And
the gentlemen, — her
preux chevaliers,
— they
were burning with other passions than those
which had driven them to her knees,
encountering a little more serious response than
“bahs” and shrugs. And, after all, a woman
seems the quickest thing forgotten when once
the important affairs of life come to men for
consideration.
It might have been ten years according
to some calculations, or ten eternities, — the
heart and the almanac never agree about
time, — but one morning old Champigny
(they used to call him Champignon) was
walking along his levee front, calculating
how soon the water would come over, and
drown him out, as the Louisianians say. It
was before a seven-o’clock breakfast, cold,
wet, rainy, and discouraging. The road was
knee-deep in mud, and so broken up with
hauling, that it was like walking upon waves
to get over it. A shower poured down. Old
Champigny was hurrying in when he saw a
figure approaching. He had to stop to look
at it, for it was worth while. The head was
hidden by a green barege veil, which the
showers had plentifully besprinkled with
dew; a tall, thin figure. Figure! No; not
even could it be called a figure: straight up
and down, like a finger or a post; high-shouldered,
and a step — a step like a plowman’s.
No umbrella; no — nothing more, in
fact. It does not sound so peculiar as when
first related — something must be forgotten.
The feet — oh, yes, the feet — they were like
waffle-irons, or frying-pans, or anything of
that shape.
Old Champigny did not care for women —
he never had; they simply did not exist for
him in the order of nature. He had been
married once, it is true, about a half century
before; but that was not reckoned against
the existence of his prejudice, because he
was
célibataire
to his
finger-tips, as any one
could see a mile away. But that woman
intrigue’d him.
He had no servant to inquire from. He
performed all of his own domestic work in
the wretched little cabin that replaced his
old home. For Champigny also belonged to
the great majority of the
nouveaux pauvres.
He went out into the rice-field, where were
one or two hands that worked on shares with
him, and he asked them. They knew
immediately; there is nothing connected with the
parish that a field-hand does not know at
once. She was the teacher of the colored
public school some three or four miles away.
“Ah,” thought Champigny, “some Northern
lady on a mission.” He watched to see her
return in the evening, which she did, of
course; in a blinding rain. Imagine the
green barege veil then; for it remained always
down over her face.
Old Champigny could not get over it that
he had never seen her before. But he must
have seen her, and, with his abstraction and
old age, not have noticed her, for he found
out from the negroes that she had been
teaching four or five years there. And he
found out also — how, is not important — that
she was Idalie Sainte Foy Mortemart des
Islets. La
grande demoiselle! He had never
known her in the old days, owing to
his uncomplimentary attitude toward women,
but he knew of her, of course, and of her
family. It should have been said that his
plantation was about fifty miles higher up
the river, and on the opposite bank to Reine
Sainte Foy. It seemed terrible. The old
gentleman had had reverses of his own,
which would bear the telling, but nothing
was more shocking to him than this — that
Idalie Sainte Foy Mortemart des Islets
should be teaching a public colored school
for — it makes one blush to name it — seven
dollars and a half a month. For seven dollars
and a half a month to teach a set of —
well! He found out where she lived, a little
cabin — not so much worse than his own, for
that matter — in the corner of a field; no
companion, no servant, nothing but food and
shelter. Her clothes have been described.
Only the good God himself knows what
passed in Champigny’s mind on the subject.
We know only the results. He went and
married la
grande demoiselle. How? Only the
good God knows that too. Every first
of the month, when he goes to the city to
buy provisions, he takes her with him — in
fact, he takes her everywhere with him.
Passengers on the railroad know them
well, and they always have a chance to see
her face. When she passes her old plantation
la grande
demoiselle always lifts her veil
for one instant — the inevitable green barege
veil. What a face! Thin, long, sallow, petrified!
And the neck! If she would only tie
something around the neck! And her plain,
coarse cottonade gown! The negro women
about her were better dressed than she.
Poor old Champignon! It was not an act
of charity to himself, no doubt cross and
disagreeable, besides being ugly. And as for
love, gratitude!
MIMI’S MARRIAGE
THIS
is how she told about it, sitting in
her little room, — her bridal chamber, —
not larger, really not larger than sufficed for
the bed there, the armoire here, the bureau
opposite, and the washstand behind the door,
the corners all touching. But a nice set of
furniture, quite
comme il faut,
— handsome, in fact, — as
a bride of good family should have.
And she was dressed very prettily, too, in her
long white
negligée with plenty of lace
and ruffles and blue ribbons, — such as only the
Creole girls can make, and brides, alas! wear,
— the pretty honeymoon costume that suggests,
that suggests — well! to proceed. “The
poor little cat!” as one could not help calling
her, so
mignonne,
so blonde, with the pretty
black eyes, and the rosebud of a mouth, —
whenever she closed it, — a perfect kiss.
“But you know, Louise,” she said, beginning
quite seriously at the beginning, “papa
would never have consented, never, never —
poor papa! Indeed, I should never have
asked him; it would only have been one
humiliation more for him, poor papa! So it
was well he was dead, if it was God’s will for
it to be. Of course I had my dreams, like
everybody. I was so blonde, so blonde, and
so small; it seemed like a law I should marry
a
brun,
a tall, handsome
brun, with a mustache and a fine
barytone voice. That was
how I always arranged it, and — you will
laugh — but a large, large house, and
numbers of servants, and a good cook, but a
superlatively good cuisine, and wine and all
that, and long, trailing silk dresses, and theater
every night, and voyages to Europe, and
— well, everything God had to give, in fact.
You know, I get that from papa, wanting
everything God has to give! Poor papa!
It seemed to me I was to meet him at any
time, my handsome
brun.
I used to look for him positively on my
way to school, and back
home again, and whenever I would think of
him I would try and walk so prettily, and
look so pretty! Mon
Dieu! I was not ten years old yet! And
afterward it was only for
that that I went into society. What should
girls go into society for otherwise but to meet
their brun
or their blond? Do you think it
is amusing, to economize and economize, and
sew and sew, just to go to a party to dance?
No! I assure you, I went into society only
for that; and I do not believe what girls say
— they go into society only for that too.
“You know at school how we used to
tirer la bonne aventure.
Well, every time he was
not
brun, riche, avenant,
Jules, or Raoul, or Guy,
I simply would not accept it, but would
go on drawing until I obtained what I wanted.
As I tell you, I thought it was my destiny.
And when I would try with a flower to see if
he loved me, —
Il m’aime, un peu, beaucoup, passionément, pas du tout,
—
if it were pas
du tout, I would always throw the flower away,
and begin tearing off the leaves from another
one immediately.
Passionément was what
I wanted, and I always got it in the end.
“But papa, poor papa, he never knew
anything of that, of course. He would get
furious when any one would come to see me, and
sometimes, when he would take me in society,
if I danced with a ‘nobody,’ — as he called
no matter whom I danced with, — he would
come up and take me away with such an air
— such an air! It would seem that papa
thought himself better than everybody in the
world. But it went worse and worse with
papa, not only in the affairs of the world, but
in health. Always thinner and thinner, always
a cough; in fact, you know, I am a little
feeble-chested myself, from papa. And
Clementine! Clementine with her children —
just think, Louise, eight! I thank God my
mama had only me, if papa’s second wife had
to have so many. And so naughty! I assure
you, they were all devils; and no correction,
no punishment, no education — but you know
Clementine! I tell you, sometimes on
account of those children I used to think
myself in ’ell [making the Creole’s attempt and
failure to pronounce the h], and Clementine
had no pride about them. If they had shoes,
well; if they had not shoes, well also.
“‘But Clementine!’ I would expostulate,
I would pray —
“‘But do not be a fool, Mimi,’ she would
say. ‘Am I God? Can I do miracles? Or
must I humiliate your papa?’
“That was true. Poor papa! It would
have humiliated papa. When he had money
he gave; only it was a pity he had no money.
As for what he observed, he thought it was
Clementine’s negligence. For, it is true,
Clementine had no order, no industry, in the
best of fortune as in the worst. But to do
her justice, it was not her fault this time,
only she let him believe it, to save his pride;
and Clementine, you know, has a genius for
stories. I assure you, Louise, I was desperate.
I prayed to God to help me, to advise
me. I could not teach — I had no education;
I could not go into a shop — that would
be dishonoring papa — and
enfin,
I was
too pretty. ‘And proclaim to the world,’
Clementine
would cry, ‘that your papa does not
make money for his family.’ That was true.
The world is so malicious. You know, Louise,
sometimes it seems to me the world is
glad to hear that a man cannot support his
family; it compliments those who can. As
if papa had not intelligence, and honor, and
honesty! But they do not count now as in
old times, ‘before the war.’
“And so, when I thought of that, I laughed
and talked and played the thoughtless like
Clementine, and made bills. We made bills
— we had to — for everything; we could do
that, you know, on our old name and family.
But it is too long! I am sure it is too long
and tiresome! What egotism on my part!
Come, we will take a glass of anisette, and
talk of something else — your trip, your
family. No? no? You are only asking me
out of politeness! You are so
aimable, so kind.
Well, if you are not
ennuyée
— in fact, I want to
tell you. It was too long to
write, and I detest a pen. To me there is
no instrument of torture like a pen.
“Well, the lady next door, she was an
American, and common, very common,
according to papa. In comparison to us she
had no family whatever. Our little children
were forbidden even to associate with her
little children. I thought that was ridiculous —
not that I am a democrat, but I thought it
ridiculous. But the children cared; they were
so disobedient and they were always next
door, and they always had something nice to
eat over there. I sometimes thought
Clementine used to encourage their disobedience,
just for the good things they got to eat over
there. But papa was always making fun of
them; you know what a sharp tongue he had.
The gentleman was a clerk; and, according
to papa, the only true gentlemen in the world
had family and a profession. We did not dare
allow ourselves to. think it, but Clementine
and I knew that they, in fact, were in more
comfortable circumstances than we.
“The lady, who also had a great number
of children, sent one day, with all the discretion
and delicacy possible, and asked me if I
would be so kind as to — guess what, Louise!
But only guess! But you never could! Well,
to darn some of her children’s stockings for
her. It was God who inspired her, I am
sure, on account of my praying so much to
him. You will be shocked, Louise, when I
tell you. It sounds like a sin, but I was not
in despair when papa died. It was a grief, —
yes, it seized the heart, but it was not despair.
Men ought not to be subjected to the humiliation
of life; they are not like women, you
know. We are made to stand things; they
have their pride, — their
orgueil,
as
we say in French, — and that is the point of honor with
some men. And Clementine and I, we could
not have concealed it much longer. In fact,
the truth was crying out everywhere, in the
children, in the house, in our own persons,
in our faces. The darning did not provide a
superfluity, I guarantee you!
“Poor papa! He caught cold. He was
condemned from the first. And so all his
fine qualities died; for he had fine qualities —
they were too fine for this age, that was all.
Yes; it was a kindness of God to take him
before he found out. If it was to be, it was
better. Just so with Clementine as with me.
After the funeral — crack! everything went
to pieces. We were at the four corners for
the necessaries of life, and the bills came in —
my dear, the bills that came in! What memories!
what memories! Clementine and I exclaimed;
there were some bills that we had
completely forgotten about. The lady next
door sent her brother over when papa died.
He sat up all night, that night, and he
assisted us in all our arrangements. And he
came in afterward, every evening. If papa
had been there, there would have been a fine
scene over it; he would have had to take the
door, very likely. But now there was no one
to make objections. And so when, as I say,
we were at the four corners for the necessaries
of life, he asked Clementine’s permission
to ask me to marry him.
“I give you my word, Louise, I had forgotten
there was such a thing as marriage in
the world for me! I had forgotten it as
completely as the chronology of the Merovingian
dynasty, alas! with all the other school things
forgotten. And I do not believe Clementine
remembered there was such a possibility in
the world for me. Mon
Dieu! when a girl is poor she may have
all the beauty in the
world — not that I had beauty, only a little
prettiness. But you should have seen
Clementine! She screamed for joy when she told
me. Oh, there was but one answer according
to her, and according to everybody she
could consult, in her haste. They all said it
was a dispensation of Providence in my favor.
He was young, he was strong; he did not
make a fortune, it was true, but he made a
good living. And what an assistance to have
a man in the family! — an assistance for
Clementine and the children. But the principal
thing, after all, was, he wanted to marry me.
Nobody had ever wanted that before, my
dear!
“Quick, quick, it was all arranged. All
my friends did something for me. One made
my
peignoirs
for me, one this, one that —
ma foi!
I did not recognize myself.
One made
all the toilet of the bureau, another of the
bed, and we all sewed on the wedding-dress
together. And you should have seen Clementine,
going out in all her great mourning,
looking for a house, looking for a servant!
But the wedding was private on account of
poor papa. But you know, Loulou, I had
never time to think, except about Clementine
and the children, and when I thought of all
those poor little children, poor papa’s children,
I said ‘Quick, quick,’ like the rest.
“It was the next day, the morning after
the wedding, I had time to think. I was
sitting here, just as you see me now, in my
pretty new
negligée. I had been looking
at all the pretty presents I have shown you, and
my trousseau, and my furniture, — it is not
bad, as you see, — my dress, my veil, my
ring, and — I do not know — I do not know
— but, all of a sudden, from everywhere
came the thought of my
brun, my handsome
brun with the
mustache, and the bonne
aventure, riche, avenant, the Jules,
Raoul, Guy,
and the flower leaves, and ‘il m’aime, un peu,
beaucoup, pas du tout,’ passionnément,
and the way I expected to meet him walking
to and from school, walking as if I were
dancing the steps, and oh, my plans, my
plans, my plans, — silk dresses, theater, voyages
to Europe, — and poor papa, so fine, so
tall, so aristocratic. I cannot tell you how
it all came; it seized my heart, and,
mon
Dieu! I cried out, and I wept, I wept, I
wept. How I wept! It pains me here now
to remember it. Hours, hours it lasted, until
I had no tears in my body, and I had to
weep without them, with sobs and moans,
But this, I have always observed, is the time
for reflection — after the tears are all out.
And I am sure God himself gave me my
thoughts. ‘Poor little Mimi!’ I thought,
“fi donc!
You are going to make a fool of
yourself now when it is all over, because
why? It is God who manages the world,
and not you. You pray to God to help you
in your despair, and he has helped you. He
has sent you a good, kind husband who
adores you; who asks only to be a brother
to your sisters and brothers, and son to
Clementine; who has given you more than
you ever possessed in your life — but because
he did not come out of the
bonne aventure —
and who gets a husband out of the
bonne aventure? —
and would your
brun
have come to you in your misfortune?’ I am sure God
inspired those thoughts in me.
“I tell you, I rose from that bed — naturally
I had thrown myself upon it. Quick I
washed my face, I brushed my hair, and, you
see these bows of ribbons, — look, here are
the marks of the tears, — I turned them.
Hé,
Loulou, it occurs to me, that if you examined
the blue bows on a bride’s
negligée,
you might always find tears on the other side;
for do they not all have to marry whom God
sends? and am I the only one who had
dreams? It is the end of dreams, marriage;
and that is the good thing about it. God
lets us dream to keep us quiet, but he knows
when to wake us up, I tell you. The blue
bows knew! And now, you see, I prefer my
husband to my
brun; in fact, Loulou, I adore him,
and I am furiously jealous about him.
And he is so good to Clementine and the
poor little children; and see his photograph
— a blond, and not good-looking, and small!
“But poor papa! If he had been alive, I
am sure he never would have agreed with
God about my marriage.”
THE MIRACLE CHAPEL
EVERY
heart has a miracle to pray for.
Every life holds that which only a miracle
can cure. To prove that there have never
been, that there can never be, miracles does
not alter the matter. So long as there is
something hoped for, — that does not come in
the legitimate channel of possible events, —
so long as something does come not to be
hoped or expected in the legitimate channel
of possible events, just so long will the
miracle be prayed for.
The rich and the prosperous, it would
seem, do not depend upon God so much, do
not need miracles, as the poor do. They do
not have to pray for the extra crust when
starvation hovers near; for the softening of
an obdurate landlord’s heart; for strength in
temptation, light in darkness, salvation from
vice; for a friend in friendlessness; for that
miracle of miracles, an opportunity to
struggling ambition; for the ending of a dark
night, the breaking of day; and, oh! for God’s
own miracle to the bedside-watchers — the
change for the better, when death is there
and the apothecary’s skill too far, far away.
The poor, the miserable, the unhappy, they
can show their miracles by the score; that is
why God is called the poor man’s friend. He
does not mind, so they say, going in the face
of logic and reason to relieve them; for often
the kind and charitable are sadly hampered
by the fetters of logic and reason, which
hold them, as it were, away from their own
benevolence.
But the rich have their miracles, no doubt,
even in that beautiful empyrean of moneyed
ease in which the poor place them. Their
money cannot buy all they enjoy, and God
knows how much of their sorrow it assuages.
As it is, one hears now and then of accidents
among them, conversions to better thoughts,
warding off of danger, rescue of life; and
heirs are sometimes born, and husbands
provided, and fortunes saved, in such surprising
ways, that even the rich, feeling their limitations
in spite of their money, must ascribe
it privately if not publicly to other potencies
than their own. These cathedral
tours de force,
however, do not, if the truth be told,
convince like the miracles of the obscure
little chapel.
There is always a more and a most obscure
little miracle chapel, and as faith seems ever
to lead unhesitatingly to the latter one, there
is ever rising out of humility and obscurity,
as in response to a demand, some new shrine,
to replace the wear and tear and loss of other
shrines by prosperity. For, alas! it is hard
even for a chapel to remain obscure and
humble in the face of prosperity and
popularity. And how to prevent such popularity
and prosperity? As soon as the noise of a
real miracle in it gets abroad, every one is
for hurrying thither at once with their needs
and their prayers, their candles and their
picayunes; and the little miracle chapel,
perhaps despite itself, becomes with mushroom
growth a church, and the church a cathedral,
from whose resplendent altars the cheap,
humble ex-voto tablets, the modest beginnings
of its ecclesiastical fortunes, are before
long banished to dimly lighted lateral shrines.
The miracle chapel in question lay at the
end of a very confusing but still intelligible
route. It is not in truth a chapel at all, but
a consecrated chamber in a very small, very
lowly cottage, which stands, or one might
appropriately, if not with absolute novelty,
say which kneels, in the center of a large
garden, a garden primeval in rusticity and
size, its limits being defined by no lesser
boundaries than the four intersecting streets
outside, and its culture showing only the
careless, shiftless culture of nature. The streets
outside were miracles themselves in that, with
their liquid contents, they were streets and not
bayous. However, they protected their island
chapel almost as well as a six-foot moat could
have done. There was a small paved space on
the sidewalk that served to the pedestrian as
an indication of the spot in the tall, long, broad
fence where a gate might be sought. It was
a small gate with a strong latch. It required
a strong hand to open it. At the sound of
the click it made, the little street ragamuffin,
who stood near, peeping through the fence,
looked up. He had worked quite a hole
between the boards with his fingers. Such an
anxious expression passed over his face that
even a casual passer-by could not help relieving
it by a question — any question:
“Is this the miracle chapel, little boy?”
“Yes, ma’am; yes.” Then his expression
changed to one of eagerness, yet hardly less
anxious.
“Here. Take this — ”
He did not hold out his hand, the coin had
to seek it. At its touch he refused to take it.
“I ain’t begging.”
“What are you looking at so through the
fence?” He was all sadness now.
“Just looking.”
“Is there anything to see inside?”
He did not answer. The interrogation
was repeated.
“I can’t see nothing. I’m blind,” putting
his eyes again to the hole, first one, then the
other.
“Come, won’t you tell me how this came
to be a miracle chapel?”
“Oh, ma’am,” — he turned his face from
the fence, and clasped his hands in excitement,
— “it was a poor widow woman who
come here with her baby that was a-dying,
and she prayed to the Virgin Mary, and the
Virgin Mary made the baby live — ”
He dropped his voice, the words falling
slower and slower. As he raised his face, one
could see then that he was blind, and
the accident that had happened to him, in
fording the street. What sightless elves! What
a wet, muddy little skeleton! Ten? No;
hardly ten years of age.
“The widow woman she picked up her
baby, and she run down the walk here, and
out into the street screaming — she was so
glad,” — putting his eyes to the peep-hole
again, — “and the Virgin Mary come down
the walk after her, and come through the
gate, too; and that was all she seed — the
widow woman.”
“Did you know the widow woman?”
He shook his head.
“How do you know it?”
“That was what they told me. And they
told me, the birds all begun to sing at once,
and the flowers all lighted up like the sun
was shining on them. They seed her. And
she come down the walk, and through the
gate,” his voice lowering again to a whisper.
Ay, how the birds must have sung, and the
flowers shone, to the widowed mother as she
ran, nay, leaped, down that rose-hedged walk,
with her restored baby clasped to her bosom!
“They seed her,”
repeated the little fellow.
“And that is why you stand here — to see
her, too?”
His shoulder turned uneasily in the clasp
upon it.
“They seed her, and they ain’t got no
eyes.”
“Have you no mother?”
“Ain’t never had no mother.”A thought
struck him. “Would that count, ma’am?
Would that count? The little baby that was
dying — yes, ma’am, it had a mother; and
it’s the mothers that come here constant
with their children; I sometimes hear ’em
dragging them in by the hand.”
“How long have you been coming here?”
“Ever since the first time I heard it,
ma’am.”
Street ragamuffins do not cry: it would be
better if they did so, when they are so young
and so blind; it would be easier for the
spectator, the auditor.
“They seed her — I might see her ef — ef
I could see her once — ef — ef I could see
anything once.” His voice faltered; but he
stiffened it instantly. “She might see me.
She can’t pass through this gate without
seeing me; and — and — ef she seed me — and
I didn’t even see her — oh, I’m so tired of
being blind!”
“Did you never go inside to pray?”
How embarrassing such a question is, even
to a child!
“No, ma’am. Does that count, too? The
little baby didn’t pray, the flowers didn’t go
inside, nor the birds. And they say the
birds broke out singing all at once, and the
flowers shined, like the sun was shining on
’em — like the sun was shining in ’em,” he
corrected himself. “The birds they can see,
and the flowers they can’t see, and they seed
her.” He shivered with the damp cold —
and perhaps too with hunger.
“Where do you live?”
He wouldn’t answer.
“What do you live on?”
He shook his head.
“Come with me.” He could not resist
the grasp on his shoulder, and the firm
directing of his bare, muddy feet through the
gate, up the walk, and into the chamber which
the Virgin found that day. He was turned to
the altar, and pressed down on his knees.
One should not look at the face of a blind
child praying to the Virgin for sight. Only
the Virgin herself should see that — and if
she once saw that little boy! There were
hearts, feet, hands, and eyes enough hanging
around to warrant hope at least, if not
faith; the effigies of the human aches and
pains that had here found relief, if not
surcease; feet and hands beholden to no physician
for their exorcism of rheumatism; eyes
and ears indebted to no oculist or aurist;
and the hearts, — they are always in
excess, — and, to the most skeptical, there is
something sweetly comforting in the sight
of so many cured hearts, with their thanks
cut deep, as they should be, in the very
marble thereof. Where the bed must have
stood was the altar, rising by easy gradations,
brave in ecclesiastical deckings, to the
plaster figure of her whom those yearning
hearts were seeing, whom those murmuring
lips were addressing. Hearts must be all
alike to her at such a distance, but the faces
to the looker-on were so different. The
eyes straining to look through all the
experiences and troubles that their life has held
to plead, as only elves can plead, to one who
can, if she will, perform their miracle for
them. And the mouths, — the sensitive
human mouths, — each one distorted by the
tragedy against which it was praying.
Their miracles! their miracles! what trifles
to divinity! Perhaps hardly more to
humanity! How far a simple looker-on could
supply them if so minded! Perhaps a liberal
exercise of love and charity by not more
than half a dozen well-to-do people could
answer every prayer in the room! But what
a miracle that would be, and how the Virgin’s
heart would gladden thereat, and jubilate over
her restored heart-dying children, even as the
widowed mother did over her one dying babe!
And the little boy had stopped praying.
The futility of it — perhaps his own
impotence — had overcome him. He was crying,
and past the shame of showing it — crying
helplessly, hopelessly. Tears were rolling
out of his sightless eyes over his wordless
lips. He could not pray; he could only cry.
What better, after all, can any of us do? But
what a prayer to a woman — to even the
plaster figure of a woman! And the Virgin
did hear him; for she had him taken without
loss of a moment to the hospital, and how
easy she made it for the physician to remove
the disability! To her be the credit.
THE STORY OF A DAY
IT
is really not much, the story; it is only
the arrangement of it, as we would say
of our dresses and our drawing-rooms.
It began with the dawn, of course; and the
skiff for our voyage, silvered with dew,
waiting in the mist for us, as if it had floated
down in a cloud from heaven to the bayou.
When repeated, this sounds like poor poetry;
but that is the way one thinks at daydawn,
when the dew is yet, as it were, upon our
brains, and our ideas are still half dreams,
and our waking hearts, alas! as innocent as
waking babies playing with their toes.
Our oars waked the waters of the bayou, as
motionless as a sleeping snake under its misty
covert — to continue the poetical language
or thought. The ripples ran frightened and
shivering into the rooty thicknesses of the
sedge-grown banks, startling the little birds
bathing there into darting to the nearest,
highest rush-top, where, without losing their
hold on their swaying, balancing perches,
they burst into all sorts of incoherent songs,
in their excitement to divert attention from
the near-hidden nests: bird mothers are so
much like women mothers!
It soon became day enough for the mist to
rise. The eyes that saw it ought to be able
to speak to tell fittingly about it.
Not all at once, nor all together, but a
thinning, a lifting, a breaking, a wearing
away; a little withdrawing here, a little
withdrawing there; and now a peep, and now
a peep; a bride lifting her veil to her
husband! Blue! White! Lilies! Blue lilies!
White lilies! Blue and white lilies! And
still blue and white lilies! And still! And
still! Wherever the veil lifted, still and always
the bride!
Not in clumps and bunches, not in spots
and patches, not in banks, meadows, acres,
but in — yes; for still it lifted beyond and
beyond and beyond; the eye could not touch
the limit of them, for the eye can touch only
the limit of vision; and the lilies filled the
whole sea-marsh, for that is the way spring
comes to the sea-marshes.
The sedge-roots might have been unsightly
along the water’s edge, but there were
morning-glories, all colors, all shades — oh, such
morning-glories as we of the city never see!
Our city morning-glories must dream of
them, as we dream of angels. Only God
could be so lavish! Dropping from the tall
spear-heads to the water, into the water,
under the water. And then, the reflection
of them, in all their colors, blue, white, pink,
purple, red, rose, violet!
To think of an obscure little Acadian bayou
waking to flow the first thing in the morning
not only through banks of new-blown
morning-glories, but sown also to its depths with
such reflections as must make it think itself
a bayou in heaven, instead of in Paroisse St.
Martin. Perhaps that is the reason the poor
poets think themselves poets, on account of
the beautiful things that are only reflected
into their minds from what is above? Besides
the reflections, there were alligators in
the bayou, trying to slip away before we
could see them, and watching us with their
stupid, senile eyes, sometimes from under the
thickest’ prettiest flowery bowers; and turtles
splashing into the water ahead of us; and
fish (silver-sided perch), looking like
reflections themselves, floating through the flower
reflections, nibbling their breakfast.
Our bayou had been running through
swamp only a little more solid than itself; in
fact, there was no solidity but what came from
the roots of grasses. Now, the banks began
to get firmer, from real soil in them. We
could see cattle in the distance, up to their
necks in the lilies, their heads and
sharp-pointed horns coming up and going down in
the blue and white. Nothing makes cattle’s
heads appear handsomer, with the sun just
rising far, far away on the other side of them. The
sea-marsh cattle turned loose to pasture in the
lush spring beauty — turned loose in Elysium!
But the land was only partly land yet, and
the cattle still cattle to us. The rising sun
made revelations, as our bayou carried us
through a drove in their Elysium, or it might
have always been an Elysium to us. It was
not all pasturage, all enjoyment. The rising
and falling feeding head was entirely different,
as we could now see, from the rising and falling
agonized head of the bogged — the buried
alive. It is well that the lilies grow taller
and thicker over the more treacherous places;
but, misery! misery! not much of the process
was concealed from us, for the cattle have to
come to the bayou for water. Such a splendid
black head that had just yielded breath! The
wide-spreading ebony horns thrown back
among the morning-glories, the mouth open
from the last sigh, the glassy eyes staring
straight at the beautiful blue sky above,
where a ghostly moon still lingered, the velvet
neck ridged with veins and muscles, the body
already buried in black ooze. And such a
pretty red-and-white-spotted heifer, lying on
her side, opening and shutting her eyes,
breathing softly in meek resignation to her
horrible calamity! And, again, another one
was plunging and battling in the act of
realizing her doom: a fierce, furious, red cow,
glaring and bellowing at the soft, yielding
inexorable abysm under her, the bustards
settling afar off, and her own species browsing
securely just out of reach.
They understand that much, the sea-marsh
cattle, to keep out of reach of the dead
combatant. In the delirium of anguish, relief
cannot be distinguished from attack, and
rescue of the victim has been proved to mean
goring of the rescuer.
The bayou turned from it at last, from our
beautiful lily world about which our pleasant
thoughts had ceased to flow even in bad
poetry.
Our voyage was for information, which
might be obtained at a certain habitation; if
not there, at a second one, or surely at a third
and most distant settlement.
The bayou narrowed into a canal, then
widened into a bayou again, and the low, level
swamp and prairie advanced into woodland
and forest. Oak-trees began, our beautiful
oak-trees! Great branches bent down almost
to the water, — quite even with high water, —
covered with forests of oak, parasites, lichens,
and with vines that swept our heads as we
passed under them, drooping now and then
to trail in the water, a plaything for the fishes,
and a landing-place for amphibious insects.
The sun speckled the water with its flickering
patterns, showering us with light and heat.
We have no spring suns; our sun, even in
December, is a summer one.
And so, with all its grace of curve and bend,
and so — the description is longer than the
voyage — we come to our first stopping-place.
To the side, in front of the well-kept fertile
fields, like a proud little showman, stood the
little house. Its pointed shingle roof covered
it like the top of a chafing-dish, reaching
down to the windows, which peeped out from
under it like little eyes.
A woman came out of the door to meet us.
She had had time during our graceful winding
approach to prepare for us. What an
irrevocable vow to old maidenhood! At
least twenty-five, almost a possible
grandmother, according to Acadian computation,
and well in the grip of advancing years. She
was dressed in a stiff, dark red calico gown,
with a white apron. Her black hair, smooth
and glossy under a varnish of grease, was
plaited high in the back, and dropped regular
ringlets, six in all, over her forehead.
That was the epoch when her calamity came
to her, when the hair was worn in that
fashion. A woman seldom alters her coiffure
after a calamity of a certain nature happens
to her. The figure had taken a compact rigidity,
an unfaltering inflexibility, all the world
away from the elasticity of matronhood; and
her eyes were clear and fixed like her figure,
neither falling, nor rising, nor puzzling under
other eyes. Her lips, her hands, her slim
feet, were conspicuously single, too, in their
intent, neither reaching, nor feeling, nor
running for those other lips, hands, and feet
which should have doubled their single life.
That was Adorine Mérionaux, otherwise
the most industrious Acadian and the best
cottonade-weaver in the parish. It had been
short, her story. A woman’s love is still with
those people her story. She was thirteen
when she met him. That is the age for an
Acadian girl to meet him, because, you know,
the large families — the thirteen, fourteen,
fifteen, twenty children — take up the years; and
when one wishes to know one’s great-great-grandchildren
(which is the dream of the Acadian
girl) one must not delay one’s story.
She had one month to love him in, and in
one week they were to have the wedding.
The Acadians believe that marriage must
come au
point, as cooks say their sauces
must be served. Standing on the bayou-bank
in front of the Mérionaux, one could say
“Good day” with the eyes to the
Zévérin
Theriots — that was the name of the parents
of the young bridegroom. Looking under the
branches of the oaks, one could see across
the prairie, — prairie and sea-marsh it was, —
and clearly distinguish another little
red-washed house like the Mérionaux, with a
painted roof hanging over the windows, and
a staircase going up outside to the garret.
With the sun shining in the proper direction,
one might distinguish more, and with love
shining like the sun in the eyes, one might
see, one might see — a heart full.
It was only the eyes, however, which could
make such a quick voyage to the Zévérin
Theriots; a skiff had a long day’s journey
to reach them. The bayou sauntered along
over the country like a negro on a Sunday’s
pleasuring, trusting to God for time, and to
the devil for means.
Oh, nothing can travel quickly over a
bayou! Ask any one who has waited on a
bayou-bank for a physician or a life-and-death
message. Thought refuses to travel
and turn and double over it; thought, like the
eye, takes the shortest cut — straight over
the sea-marsh; and in the spring of the year,
when the lilies are in bloom, thought could
not take a more heavenly way, even from
beloved to beloved.
It was the week before marriage, that week
when, more than one’s whole life afterward,
one’s heart feels most longing — most
— well, in fact, it was the week before
marriage. From Sunday to Sunday, that was
all the time to be passed. Adorine — women
live through this week by the grace of God,
or perhaps they would be as unreasonable as
the men — Adorine could look across the
prairie to the little red roof during the day,
and could think across it during the night,
and get up before day to look across again —
longing, longing all the time. Of course
one must supply all this from one’s own
imagination or experience.
But Adorine could sing, and she sang.
One might hear, in a favorable wind, a gunshot,
or the barking of a dog from one place
to the other, so that singing, as to effect, was
nothing more than the voicing of her looking
and thinking and longing.
When one loves, it is as if everything was
known of and seen by the other; not only all
that passes in the head and heart, which
would in all conscience be more than enough
to occupy the other, but the talking, the
dressing, the conduct. It was then that the
back hair was braided and the front curled
more and more beautifully every day, and
that the calico dresses became stiffer and
stiffer and the white crochet lace collar
broader and lower in the neck. At thirteen
she was beautiful enough to startle one, they
say, but that was nothing; she spent time and
care upon these things, as if, like other
women, her fate seriously depended upon
them. There is no self-abnegation like that
of a woman in love.
It was her singing, however, which most
showed that other existence in her existence.
When she sang at her spinning-wheel or her
loom, or knelt battling clothes on the bank
of the bayou, her lips would kiss out the
words, and the tune would rise and fall and
tremble, as if Zepherin were just across there,
anywhere; in fact, as if every blue and white
lily might hide an ear of him.
It was the time of the new moon, fortunately,
when all sit up late in the country.
The family would stop in their talking about
the wedding to listen to her. She did not
know it herself, but it — the singing — was
getting louder and clearer, and, poor little
thing, it told everything. And after the
family went to bed they could still hear her,
sitting on the bank of the bayou, or up in her
window, singing and looking at the moon
traveling across the lily prairie — for all its
beauty and brightness no more beautiful and
bright than a heart in love.
It was just past the middle of the week, a
Thursday night. The moon was so bright the
colors of the lilies could be seen, and the singing,
so sweet, so far-reaching — it was the
essence of the longing of love. Then it was
that the miracle happened to her. Miracles
are always happening to the Acadians. She
could not sleep, she could not stay in bed.
Her heart drove her to the window, and kept
her there, and — among the civilized it could
not take place, but here she could sing as she
pleased in the middle of the night; it was
nobody’s affair, nobody’s disturbance. “Saint
Ann! Saint Joseph! Saint Mary!” She heard
her song answered! She held her heart, she
bent forward, she sang again. Oh, the air
was full of music! It was all music! She fell
on her knees; she listened, looking at the
moon; and, with her face in her hands, looking
at Zepherin. It was God’s choir of angels,
she thought, and one with a voice like Zepherin!
Whenever it died away she would sing
again, and again, and again —
But the sun came, and the sun is not created,
like the moon, for lovers, and whatever
happened in the night, there was work to be
done in the day. Adorine worked like one in
a trance, her face as radiant as the upturned
face of a saint. They did not know what it
was, or rather they thought it was love. Love
is so different out there, they make all kinds
of allowances for it. But, in truth, Adorine
was still hearing her celestial voices or voice.
If the cackling of the chickens, the whir of the
spinning-wheel, or the “bum bum” of the
loom effaced it a moment, she had only to go
to some still place, round her hand over her
ear, and give the line of a song, and — it was
Zepherin — Zepherin she heard.
She walked in a dream until night. When
the moon came up she was at the window,
and still it continued, so faint, so sweet, that
answer to her song. Echo never did anything
more exquisite, but she knew nothing of such
a heathen as Echo. Human nature became
exhausted. She fell asleep where she was, in
the window, and dreamed as only a bride can
dream of her groom. When she awoke,
“Adorine! Adorine!” the beautiful angel
voices called to her; “Zepherin! Zepherin!”
she answered, as if she, too, were an angel,
signaling another angel in heaven. It was
too much. She wept, and that broke the
charm. She could hear nothing more after
that. All that day was despondency, dejection,
tear-bedewed eyes, and tremulous lips,
the commonplace reaction, as all know, of
love exaltation. Adorine’s family, Acadian
peasants though they were, knew as much
about it as any one else, and all that any one
knows about it is that marriage is the cure-all,
and the only cure-all, for love.
And Zepherin? A man could better describe
his side of that week; for it, too, has
mostly to be described from imagination or
experience. What is inferred is that what
Adorine longed and thought and looked in
silence and resignation, according to woman’s
way, he suffered equally, but in a man’s way,
which is not one of silence or resignation, — at
least when one is a man of eighteen, — the last
interview, the near wedding, her- beauty, his
love, her house in sight, the full moon, the
long, wakeful nights.
He took his pirogue; but the bayou played
with his impatience, maddened his passion,
bringing him so near, to meander with him
again so far away. There was only a short
prairie between him and -, a prairie thick
with lily-roots — one could almost walk over
their heads, so close, and gleaming in the
moonlight. But this is all only inference.
The pirogue was found tethered to the
paddle stuck upright in the soft bank, and —
Adorine’s parents related the rest. Nothing
else was found until the summer drought had
bared the swamp.
There was a little girl in the house when
we arrived — all else were in the field — a
stupid, solemn, pretty child, the child of a
brother. How she kept away from Adorine,
and how much that testified!
It would have been too painful. The little
arms around her neck, the head nestling to
her bosom, sleepily pressing against it. And
the little one might ask to be sung to sleep.
Sung to sleep!
The little bed-chamber, with its high
mattressed bed, covered with the Acadian
homespun quilt, trimmed with netting fringe, its
bit of mirror over the bureau, the bottle of
perfumed grease to keep the locks black and
glossy, the prayer-beads and blessed palms
hanging on the wall, the low, black polished
spinning-wheel, the loom, — the
métier d’Adorine
famed throughout the parish, — the ever
goodly store of cotton and yarn hanks swinging
from the ceiling, and the little square,
open window which looked under the mossy
oak-branches to look over the prairie; and
once again all blue and white lilies — they
were all there, as Adorine was there; but
there was more — not there.
ANNE MARIE AND JEANNE MARIE
OLD
Jeanne Marie leaned her hand against
the house, and the tears rolled down
her cheeks. She had not wept since she
buried her last child. With her it was one
trouble, one weeping, no more; and her
wrinkled, hard, polished skin so far had
known only the tears that come after death.
The trouble in her heart now was almost
exactly like the trouble caused by death;
although she knew it was not so bad as death,
yet, when she thought of this to console herself,
the tears rolled all the faster. She took
the end of the red cotton kerchief tied over
her head, and wiped them away; for the
furrows in her face did not merely run up and
down — they ran in all directions, and carried
her tears all over her face at once. She could
understand death, but she could not understand
this.
It came about in this way: Anne Marie and
she lived in the little red-washed cabin against
which she leaned; had lived there alone with
each other for fifty years, ever since Jeanne
Marie’s husband had died, and the three children
after him, in the fever epidemic.
The little two-roomed cabin, the stable
where there used to be a cow, the patch of
ground planted with onions, had all been
bought and paid for by the husband; for he
was a thrifty, hard-working Gascon, and had
he lived there would not have been one
better off, or with a larger family, either in that
quarter or in any of the red-washed suburbs
with which Gascony has surrounded New
Orleans. His women, however, — the wife
and sister-in-law, — had done their share in
the work: a man’s share apiece, for with the
Gascon women there is no discrimination of
sex when it comes to work.
And they worked on just the same after he
died, tending the cow, digging, hoeing, planting,
watering. The day following the funeral,
by daylight Jeanne Marie was shouldering
around the yoke of milk-cans to his patrons,
while Anne Marie carried the vegetables to
market; and so on for fifty years.
They were old women now, — seventy-five
years old, — and, as they expressed it, they
had always been twins. In twins there is
always one lucky and one unlucky one: Jeanne
Marie was the lucky one, Anne Marie the
unlucky one. So much so, that it was even
she who had to catch the rheumatism, and to
lie now bedridden, months at a time, while
Jeanne Marie was as active in her sabots as
she had ever been.
In spite of the age of both, and the infirmity
of one, every Saturday night there was
some little thing to put under the brick in the
hearth, for taxes and license, and the
never-to-be-forgotten funeral provision. In the
husband’s time gold pieces used to go in, but they
had all gone to pay for the four funerals and
the quadrupled doctor’s bill. The women
laid in silver pieces; the coins, however, grew
smaller and smaller, and represented more
and more not so much the gain from onions
as the saving from food.
It had been explained to them how they
might, all at once, make a year’s gain in the
lottery; and it had become their custom
always, at the end of every month, to put
aside one silver coin apiece, to buy a lottery
ticket with — one ticket each, not for the
great, but for the twenty-five-cent, prizes.
Anne Marie would buy hers round about the
market; Jeanne Marie would stop anywhere
along her milk course and buy hers, and they
would go together in the afternoon to stand
with the little crowd watching the placard
upon which the winning numbers were to be
written. And when they were written, it was
curious, Jeanne Marie’s numbers would come
out twice as often as Anne Marie’s. Not that
she ever won anything, for she was not lucky
enough to have them come out in the order to
win; they only came out here and there,
singly: but it was sufficient to make old
Anne Marie cross and ugly for a day or two,
and injure the sale of the onion-basket. When
she became bedridden, Jeanne Marie bought
the ticket for both, on the numbers, however,
that Anne Marie gave her; and Anne Marie
had to lie in bed and wait, while Jeanne Marie
went out to watch the placard.
One evening, watching it, Jeanne Marie
saw the ticket-agent write out the numbers as
they came on her ticket, in such a way that
they drew a prize — forty dollars.
When the old woman saw it she felt such
a happiness; just as she used to feel in the old
times right after the birth of a baby. She
thought of that instantly. Without saying a
word to any one, she clattered over the
banquette
as fast as she could in her sabots, to
tell the good news to Anne Marie. But she
did not go so fast as not to have time to
dispose of her forty dollars over and over again.
Forty dollars! That was a great deal of
money. She had often in her mind, when
she was expecting a prize, spent twenty
dollars; for she had never thought it could
be more than that. But forty dollars! A new
gown apiece, and black silk kerchiefs to tie
over their heads instead of red cotton, and
the little cabin new red-washed, and soup in
the pot, and a garlic sausage, and a bottle of
good, costly liniment for Anne Marie’s legs;
and still a pile of gold to go under the
hearth-brick — a pile of gold that would have made
the eyes of the defunct husband glisten.
She pushed open the picket-gate, and came
into the room where her sister lay in bed.
“Eh, Anne Marie, my girl,” she called in
her thick, pebbly voice, apparently made
purposely to suit her rough Gascon accent; “this
time we have caught it!”
“Whose ticket?” asked Anne Marie, instantly.
In a flash all Anne Marie’s ill luck ran
through Jeanne Marie’s mind;- how her
promised husband had proved unfaithful, and
Jeanne Marie’s faithful; and how, ever since,
even to the coming out of her lottery numbers,
even to the selling of vegetables, even
to the catching of the rheumatism, she had
been the loser. But above all, as she looked
at Anne Marie in the bed, all the misery came
over Jeanne Marie of her sister’s not being
able, in all her poor old seventy-five years
of life, to remember the pressure of the
arms of a husband about her waist, nor the
mouth of a child on her breast.
As soon as Anne Marie had asked her question,
Jeanne Marie answered it.
“But your ticket,
Coton-Maï!”
“Where? Give it
here! Give it here!”
The old woman, who had not been able to
move her back for weeks, sat bolt upright in
bed, and stretched out her great bony fingers,
with the long nails as hard and black as
rake-prongs from groveling in the earth.
Jeanne Marie poured the money out of her
cotton handkerchief into them.
Anne Marie counted it, looked at it;
looked at it, counted it; and if she had not
been so old, so infirm, so toothless, the smile
that passed over her face would have made it
beautiful.
Jeanne Marie had to leave her to draw
water from the well to water the plants, and
to get her vegetables ready for next morning.
She felt even happier now than if she had just
had a child, happier even than if her husband
had just returned to her.
“Ill luck!
Coton-Maï! Ill luck! There’s
a way to turn ill luck!” And her smile also
should have beautified her face, wrinkled and
ugly though it was.
She did not think any more of the spending
of the money, only of the pleasure Anne
Marie would take in spending it.
The water was low in the well, and there
had been a long drought. There are not
many old women of seventy-five who could
have watered so much ground as abundantly
as she did; but whenever she thought of
the forty dollars and Anne Marie’s smile
she would give the thirsting plant an extra
bucketful.
The twilight was gaining. She paused.
“Coton-Maï!” she
exclaimed aloud. “But
I must see the old woman smile again over
her good luck.”
Although it was “my girl” face to face, it
was always “the old woman” behind each
other’s back.
There was a knot-hole in the plank walls
of the house. In spite of Anne Marie’s
rheumatism they would never stop it up, needing
it, they said, for light and air. Jeanne Marie
slipped her feet out of her sabots and crept
easily toward it, smiling, and saying
“
Coton-Maï!” to
herself all the way. She put her
eye to the hole. Anne Marie was not in the
bed, she who had not left her bed for two
months! Jeanne Marie looked through the
dim light of the room until she found her.
Anne Marie, in her short petticoat and
nightsack, with bare legs and feet, was on
her knees in the corner, pulling up a plank,
hiding — peasants know hiding when they see
it — hiding her money away — away — away
from whom? — muttering to herself and shaking
her old grayhaired head. Hiding her
money away from Jeanne Marie!
And this was why Jeanne Marie leaned
her head against the side of the house and
wept. It seemed to her that she had never
known her twin sister at all.
A CRIPPLED HOPE
YOU
must picture to
yourself the quiet,
dim-lighted room of a convalescent; outside,
the dreary, bleak days of winter in a
sparsely settled, distant country parish; inside,
a slow, smoldering log-fire, a curtained
bed, the infant sleeping well enough, the
mother wakeful, restless, thought-driven, as
a mother must be, unfortunately, nowadays,
particularly in that parish, where cotton
worms and overflows have acquired such a
monopoly of one’s future.
God is always pretty near a sick woman’s
couch; but nearer even than God seems the
sick-nurse — at least in that part of the country,
under those circumstances. It is so good
to look through the dimness and uncertainty,
moral and physical, and to meet those little
black, steadfast, all-seeing eyes; to feel those
smooth, soft, all-soothing hands; to hear,
across one’s sleep, that three-footed step —
the flat-soled left foot, the tiptoe right, and the
padded end of the broomstick; and when one
is so wakeful and restless and thought-driven,
to have another’s story given one. God, depend
upon it, grows stories and lives as he
does herbs, each with a mission of balm to
some woe.
She said she had, and in truth she had,
no other name than “little Mammy”; and
that was the name of her nature. Pure
African, but bronze rather than pure black,
and full-sized only in width, her growth having
been hampered as to height by an injury to
her hip, which had lamed her, pulling her
figure awry, and burdening her with a protuberance
of the joint. Her mother caused it by
dropping her when a baby, and concealing it,
for fear of punishment, until the dislocation
became irremediable. All the animosity of
which little Mammy was capable centered
upon this unknown but never-to-be-forgotten
mother of hers; out of this hatred had grown
her love — that is, her destiny, a woman’s
love being her destiny. Little Mammy’s love
was for children.
The birth and infancy (the one as accidental
as the other, one would infer) took place in —
it sounds like the “Arabian Nights” now! —
took place in the great room, caravansary,
stable, behind a negro-trader’s auction-mart,
where human beings underwent literally the
daily buying and selling of which the world
now complains in a figure of speech — a great,
square, dusty chamber where, sitting cross-legged,
leaning against the wall, or lying on
foul blanket pallets on the floor, the bargains
of to-day made their brief sojourn, awaiting
transformation into the profits of the morrow.
The place can be pointed out now, is often
pointed out; but no emotion arises at sight of
it. It is so plain, so matter-of-fact an edifice
that emotion only comes afterward in thinking
about it, and then in the reflection that such
an edifice could be, then as now, plain and
matter-of-fact.
For the slave-trader there was no capital
so valuable as the physical soundness of his
stock; the moral was easily enough forged
or counterfeited. Little Mammy’s good-for-nothing
mother was sold as readily as a vote,
in the parlance of to-day; but no one would
pay for a crippled baby. The mother herself
would not have taken her as a gift, had it
been in the nature of a negro-trader to give
away anything. Some doctoring was done, —
so little Mammy heard traditionally, — some
effort made to get her marketable. There
were attempts to pair her off as a twin sister
of various correspondencies in age, site, and
color, and to palm her off, as a substitute, at
migratory, bereaved, overfull breasts. Nothing
equaled a negro-trader’s will and power
for fraud, except the hereditary distrust and
watchfulness which it bred and maintained.
And so, in the even balance between the two
categories, the little cripple remained a fixture
in the stream of life that passed through that
back room, in the fluxes and refluxes of buying
and selling; not valueless, however —
rely upon a negro-trader for discovering
values as substitutes, as panaceas. She earned
her nourishment, and Providence did not let
it kill the little animal before the emancipation
of weaning arrived.
How much circumstances evoked, how
much instinct responded, belongs to the
secrets which nature seems to intend keeping.
As a baby she had eyes, attention, solely for
other babies. One cannot say while she was
still crawling, for she could only crawl years
after she should have been walking, but,
before even precocious walking-time, tradition
or the old gray-haired negro janitor relates,
she would creep from baby to baby to play
with it, put it to sleep, pat it, rub its stomach
(a negro baby, you know, is all stomach, and
generally aching stomach at that). And before
she had a lap, she managed to force one
for some ailing nursling. It was then that
they began to call her “little Mammy.” In
the transitory population of the “pen” no one
stayed long enough to give her another name;
and no one ever stayed short enough to give
her another one.
Her first recollection of herself was that
she could not walk — she was past crawling;
she cradled herself along, as she called
sitting down flat, and working herself about
with her hands and her one strong leg.
Babbling babies walked all around her, —
many walking before they babbled, — and
still she did not walk, imitate them as she
might and did. She would sit and “study”
about it, make another trial, fall; sit and
study some more, make another trial, fall
again. Negroes, who believe that they must
give a reason for everything even if they
have to invent one, were convinced that it
was all this studying upon her lameness that
gave her such a large head.
And now she began secretly turning up
the clothes of every negro child that came
into that pen, and examining its legs, and
still more secretly examining her own,
stretched out before her on the ground.
How long it took she does not remember;
in fact, she could not have known, for she
had no way of measuring time except by her
thoughts and feelings. But in her own way
and time the due process of deliberation was
fulfilled, and the quotient made clear that,
bowed or not, all children’s legs were of
equal length except her own, and all were
alike, not one full, strong, hard, the other
soft, flabby, wrinkled, growing out of a knot
at the hip. A whole psychological period
apparently lay between that conclusion and
— a broom-handle walking-stick; but the
broomstick came, as it was bound to come, —
thank heaven! — from that premise, and what
with stretching one limb to malice it longer,
and doubling up the other to make it shorter,
she invented that form of locomotion which
is still carrying her through life, and with
no more exaggerated leg-crookedness than
many careless negroes born with straight
limbs display. This must have been when
she was about eight or nine. Hobbling on
a broomstick, with, no doubt, the same weird,
wizened face as now, an innate sense of the
fitness of things must have suggested the
kerchief tied around her big head, and the
burlaps rag of an apron in front of her
linsey-woolsey rag of a gown, and the bit of broken
pipe-stem in the corner of her mouth, where
the pipe should have been, and where it was
in after years. That is the way she recollected
herself, and that is the way one recalls
her now; with a few modifications.
The others came and went, but she was
always there. It wasn’t long before she
became “little Mammy” to the grown folks
too; and the newest inmates soon learned to
cry: “Where’s little Mammy?” “Oh, little
Mammy! little Mammy! Such a misery in
my head [or my back, or my stomach]!
Can’t you help me, little Mammy?” It was
curious what a quick eye she had for symptoms
and ailments, and what a quick ear for
suffering, and how apt she was at picking up,
remembering, and inventing remedies. It
never occurred to her not to crouch at the
head or the foot of a sick pallet, day and
night through. As for the nights, she said
she dared not close her eyes of nights. The
room they were in was so vast, and sometimes
the negroes lay so thick on the floor,
rolled in their blankets (you know, even in
the summer they sleep under blankets), all
snoring so loudly, she would never have
heard a groan or a whimper any more than
they did, if she had slept, too. And negro
mothers are so careless and such heavy
sleepers. All night she would creep at
regular intervals to the different pallets, and
draw the little babies from under, or away
from, the heavy, inert impending mother
forms. There is no telling how many she thus
saved from being overlaid and smothered, or,
what was worse, maimed and crippled.
Whenever a physician came in, as he was
sometimes called, to look at a valuable investment
or to furbish up some piece of damaged
goods, she always managed to get near to
hear the directions; and she generally was
the one to apply them also, for negroes
always would steal medicines most scurvily
one from the other. And when death at
times would slip into the pen, despite the
trader’s utmost alertness and precautions, — as
death often “had to do,” little Mammy said,
— when the time of some of them came to
die, and when the rest of the negroes, with
African greed of eye for the horrible, would
press around the lowly couch where the
agonizing form of a slave lay writhing out
of life, she would always to the last give
medicines, and wipe the cold forehead, and
soothe the clutching, fearsome hands, hoping
to the end, and trying to inspire the
hope that his or her “time” had not come
yet; for, as she said, “Our time does not come
just as often as it does come.”
And in those sad last offices, which somehow
have always been under reproach as a
kind of shame, no matter how young she
was, she was always too old to have the
childish avoidance of them. On the contrary,
to her a corpse was only a kind of
baby, and she always strove, she said, to
make one, like the other, easy and comfortable.
And in other emergencies she divined the
mysteries of the flesh, as other precocities
divine the mysteries of painting and music,
and so become child wonders.
Others came and went. She alone remained
there. Babies of her babyhood —
the toddlers she, a toddler, had nursed —
were having babies themselves now; the
middle-aged had had time to grow old and die.
Every week new families were coming into
the great back chamber; every week they
passed out: babies, boys, girls, buxom
wenches, stalwart youths, and the middle-aged
— the grave, serious ones whom misfortune
had driven from their old masters, and the
ill-reputed ones, the trickish, thievish, lazy,
whom the cunning of the negro-trader alone
could keep in circulation. All were marketable,
all were bought and sold, all passed in
one door and out the other — all except her,
little Mammy. As with her lameness, it took
time for her to recognize, to understand, the
fact. She could study over her lameness, she
could in the dull course of time think out the
broomstick way of palliation. It would have
been almost better, under the circumstances,
for God to have kept the truth from her; only
— God keeps so little of the truth from us
women. It is his system.
Poor little thing! It was not now that her
master could not sell her,
but he would not! Out of
her own intelligence she had forged
her chains; the lameness was a hobble merely
in comparison. She had become too valuable
to the negro-trader by her services among his
crew, and offers only solidified his determination
not to sell her. Visiting physicians, after
short acquaintance with her capacities, would
offer what were called fancy prices for her.
Planters who heard of her through their
purchases would come to the city purposely to
secure, at any cost, so inestimable an adjunct
to their plantations. Even ladies — refined,
delicate ladies — sometimes came to the pen
personally to back money with influence. In
vain. Little Mammy was worth more to the
negro-trader, simply as a kind of insurance
against accidents, than any sum, however
glittering the figure, and he was no ignorant
expert in human wares. She can tell it; no
one else can for her. Remember that at
times she had seen the streets outside.
Remember that she could hear of the outside
world daily from the passing chattels — of the
plantations, farms, families; the green fields,
Sunday woods, running streams; the camp-meetings,
corn-shuckings, cotton-pickings, sugar-grindings;
the baptisms, marriages, funerals,
prayer-meetings; the holidays and holy
days. Remember that, whether for liberty or
whether for love, passion effloresces in the
human being — no matter when, where, or
how — with every spring’s return. Remember
that she was, even in middle age, young
and vigorous. But no; do not remember
anything. There is no need to heighten the
coloring.
It would be tedious to relate, although it
was not tedious to hear her relate it, the
desperations and hopes of her life then. Hardly
a day passed that she did not see, looking for
purchases (rummaging among goods on a
counter for bargains), some master whom she
could have loved, some mistress whom she
could have adored. Always her favorite
mistresses were there — tall, delicate matrons,
who came themselves, with great fatigue, to
select kindly-faced women for nurses;
languid-looking ladies with smooth hair
standing out in wide
bandeaux
from their heads, and lace shawls dropping
from their sloping
shoulders, silk dresses carelessly held up in
thumb and finger from embroidered petticoats
that were spread out like tents over huge
hoops which covered whole groups of swarming
piccaninnies on the dirty floor; ladies, pale
from illnesses that she might have nursed,
and over-burdened with children whom she
might have reared! And not a lady of that
kind saw her face but wanted her, yearned
for her, pleaded for her, coming back secretly
to slip silver, and sometimes gold, pieces into
her hand, patting her turbaned head, calling
her “little Mammy” too, instantly, by inspiration,
and making the negro-trader give them,
with all sorts of assurances, the refusal of her.
She had no need for the whispered “Buy me,
master!” “Buy me, mistress!” “You’ll see
how I can work, master!” “You’ll never be
sorry, mistress!” of the others. The negro-trader
— like hangmen, negro-traders are fitted
by nature for their profession — it came
into his head — he had no heart, not even
a negro-trader’s heart — that it would be more
judicious to seclude her during these shopping
visits, so to speak. She could not have
had any hopes then at all; it must have been
all desperations.
That auction-block, that executioner’s block,
about which so much has been written — Jacob’s
ladder, in his dream, was nothing to
what that block appeared nightly in her
dreams to her; and the climbers up and down
— well, perhaps Jacob’s angels were his
hopes, too.
At times she determined to depreciate her
usefulness, mar her value, by renouncing her
heart, denying her purpose. For days she
would tie her kerchief over her ears and eyes,
and crouch in a corner, strangling her
impulses. She even malingered, refused food,
became dumb. And she might have succeeded
in making herself salable through incipient
lunacy, if through no other way, had she been
able to maintain her role long enough. But
some woman or baby always was falling into
some emergency of pain and illness.
How it might have ended one does not like
to think. Fortunately, one does not need to
think.
There came a night. She sat alone in the
vast, dark caravansary — alone for the first
time in her life. Empty rags and blankets lay
strewn over the floor, no snoring, no tossing
in them more. A sacrificial sale that day had
cleared the counters. Alarm-bells rang in the
streets, but she did not know them for
alarm-bells; alarm brooded in the dim space around
her, but she did not even recognize that. Her
protracted tension of heart had made her fear-blind
to all but one peradventure.
Once or twice she forgot herself, and
limped over to some heap to 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 lady 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 beater. 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?
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 barytone, 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,
waterfalls, and châteaux 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
animalculæ.
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 minutiæ 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 role 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 chamber maid,
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.
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 eye-lashes
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 breastpin 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.
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 rang 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.
In the evening the little convent girl would
be taken on the upper deck, and going up
the steep stairs there was such confusion, to
keep the black skirts well over the stiff white
petticoats; and, coming down, such blushing
when suspicion would cross the unprepared
face that a rim of white stocking might be
visible; and the thin feet, laced so tightly in
the glossy new leather boots, would cling to
each successive step as if they could never,
never make another venture; and then one
boot would (there is but that word) hesitate
out, and feel and feel around, and have such a
pause of helpless agony as if indeed the next
step must have been wilfully removed, or was
nowhere to be found on the wide, wide earth.
It was a miracle that the pilot ever got
her up into the pilot-house; but pilots have
a lonely time, and do not hesitate even at
miracles when there is a chance for company.
He would place a box for her to climb to the
tall bench behind the wheel, and he would
arrange the cushions, and open a window
here to let in air, and shut one there to cut
off a draft, as if there could be no tenderer
consideration in life for him than her comfort.
And he would talk of the river to her, explain
the chart, pointing out eddies, whirlpools,
shoals, depths, new beds, old beds, cut-offs,
caving banks, and making banks, as exquisitely
and respectfully as if she had been
the River Commission.
It was his opinion that there was as great
a river as the Mississippi flowing directly
under it — an underself of a river, as much a
counterpart of the other as the second story
of a house is of the first; in fact, he said they
were navigating through the upper story.
Whirlpools were holes in the floor of the
upper river, so to speak; eddies were rifts
and cracks. And deep under the earth,
hurrying toward the subterranean stream,
were other streams, small and great, but all
deep, hurrying to and from that great
mother-stream underneath, just as the small and great
overground streams hurry to and from their
mother Mississippi. It was almost more than
the little convent girl could take in: at least
such was the expression of her eyes; for they
opened as all eyes have to open at pilot
stories. And he knew as much of astronomy
as he did of hydrology, could call the stars
by name, and define the shapes of the
constellations; and she, who had studied
astronomy at the convent, was charmed to find
that what she had learned was all true. It
was in the pilot-house, one night, that she
forgot herself for the first time in her life, and
stayed up until after nine o’clock. Although
she appeared almost intoxicated at the wild
pleasure, she was immediately overwhelmed
at the wickedness of it, and observed much
more rigidity of conduct thereafter. The
engineer, the boiler-men, the firemen, the
stokers, they all knew when the little convent
girl was up in the pilot-house: the speaking-tube
became so mild and gentle.
With all the delays of river and boat,
however, there is an end to the journey from
Cincinnati to New Orleans. The latter city,
which at one time to the impatient seemed
at the terminus of the never, began, all of a
sudden, one day to make its nearingness felt;
and from that period every other interest
paled before the interest in the immanence
of arrival into port, and the whole boat was
seized with a panic of preparation, the little
convent girl with the others. Although so
immaculate was she in person and effects that
she might have been struck with a landing,
as some good people might be struck with
death, at any moment without fear of results,
her trunk was packed and repacked, her
satchel arranged and rearranged, and, the last
day, her hair was brushed and plaited and
smoothed over and over again until the very
last glimmer of a curl disappeared. Her dress
was whisked, as if for microscopic inspection;
her face was washed; and her finger-nails
were scrubbed with the hard convent
nailbrush, until the disciplined little tips ached
with a pristine soreness. And still there were
hours to wait, and still the boat added up
delays. But she arrived at last, after all, with
not more than the usual and expected difference
between the actual and the advertised
time of arrival.
There was extra blowing and extra ringing,
shouting, commanding, rushing up the gangway
and rushing down the gangway. The
clerks, sitting behind tables on the first deck,
were plied, in the twinkling of an eye, with
estimates, receipts, charges, countercharges,
claims, reclaims, demands, questions, accusations,
threats, all at topmost voices. None but
steamboat clerks could have stood it. And
there were throngs composed of individuals
every one of whom wanted to see the captain
first and at once: and those who could not get
to him shouted over the heads of the others;
and as usual he lost his temper and politeness,
and began to do what he termed “hustle.”
“Captain! Captain!” a voice called him to
where a hand plucked his sleeve, and a letter
was thrust toward him. “The cross, and the
name of the convent.” He recognized the
envelop of the mother superior. He read the
duplicate of the letter given by the sisters.
He looked at the woman — the mother —
casually, then again and again.
The little convent girl saw him coming,
leading some one toward her. She rose. The
captain took her hand first, before the other
greeting, “Good-by, my dear,” he said. He
tried to add something else, but seemed
undetermined what. “Be a good little girl — ”
It was evidently all he could think of.
Nodding to the woman behind him, he turned on
his heel, and left.
One of the deck-hands was sent to fetch
her trunk. He walked out behind them,
through the cabin, and the crowd own deck,
down the stairs, and out over the gangway.
The little convent girl and her mother went
with hands tightly clasped. She did not turn
her eyes to the right or left, or once (what
all passengers do) look backward at the boat
which, however slowly, had carried her surely
over dangers that she wot not of. All looked
at her as she passed. All wanted to say good-by
to the little convent girl, to see the mother
who had been deprived of her so long. Some
expressed surprise in a whistle; some in other
ways. All exclaimed audibly, or to themselves,
“Colored!”
IT takes about a month to make the round
trip from New Orleans to Cincinnati and back,
counting five days’ stoppage in New Orleans.
It was a month to a day when the steamboat
came puffing and blowing up to the wharf
again, like a stout dowager after too long a
walk; and the same scene of confusion was
enacted, as it had been enacted twelve times
a year, at almost the same wharf for twenty
years; and the same calm, a death calmness by
contrast, followed as usual the next morning.
The decks were quiet and clean; one cargo
had just been delivered, part of another stood
ready on the levee to be shipped. The
captain was there waiting for his business to
begin, the clerk was in his office getting his
books ready, the voice of the mate could be
heard below, mustering the old crew out and
a new crew in; for if steamboat crews have
a single principle, — and there are those who
deny them any, — it is never to ship twice in
succession on the same boat. It was too
early yet for any but roustabouts, marketers,
and church-goers; so early that even the
river was still partly mist-covered; only in
places could the swift, dark current be seen
rolling swiftly along.
“Captain!” A hand plucked at his elbow,
as if not confident that the mere calling would
secure attention. The captain turned. The
mother of the little convent girl stood there,
and she held the little convent girl by the
hand. “I have brought her to see you,” the
woman said. “You were so kind — and she
is so quiet, so still, all the time, I thought it
would do her a pleasure.”
She spoke with an accent, and with embarrassment;
otherwise one would have said that
she was bold and assured enough.
“She don’t go nowhere, she don’t do
nothing but make her crochet and her prayers,
so I thought I would bring her for a little visit
of ’How d’ ye do’ to you.”
There was, perhaps, some inflection in the
woman’s voice that might have made known,
or at least awakened, the suspicion of some
latent hope or intention, had the captain’s
ear been fine enough to detect it. There might
have been something in the little convent
girl’s face, had his eye been more sensitive —
a trifle paler, may-be, the lips a little tighter
drawn, the blue ribbon a shade faded. He
may have noticed that, but — And the visit
of “How d’ ye do” came to an end.
They walked down the stairway, the woman
in front, the little convent girl — her hand
released to shake hands with the captain —
following, across the bared deck, out to the
gangway, over to the middle of it. No one
was looking, no one saw more than a flutter
of white petticoats, a show of white stockings,
as the little convent girl went under the water.
The roustabout dived, as the roustabouts
always do, after the drowning, even at the
risk of their good-for-nothing lives. The
mate himself jumped overboard; but she had
gone down in a whirlpool. Perhaps, as the
pilot had told her whirlpools always did, it
may have carried her through to the underground
river, to that vast, hidden, dark Mississippi
that flows beneath the one we see;
for her body was never found.
GRANDMOTHER’S GRANDMOTHER
AS
the grandmother related it fresh from
the primeval sources that feed a
grandmother’s memory, it happened thus:
In the early days of the settlement of
Georgia — ah, how green and rustic appears
to us now the world in the early days of the
settlement of Georgia! Sometimes to women,
listening to the stories of their grandmothers,
it seems better to have lived then than now
— her grandmother was at that time a young
wife. It was the day of arduous, if not of
long, courtship before marriage, when every
wedding celebrated the close of an original
romance; and when young couples, for bridal
trips, went out to settle new States, riding
on a pillion generally, with their trousseaux
following as best they could on sumpter
mules; to hear the grandmother describe it
made one long to be a bride of those days.
The young husband had the enumeration
of qualities that went to the making of a man
of that period, and if the qualities were in the
proportion of ten physical to one intellectual,
it does not follow that the grandmother’s
grandfather was not a man of parts. For, to
obtain the hand of his bride, an only child
and an heiress, he had to give test of his
mettle by ignoring his fortune, studying law,
and getting his license before marriage, and
binding himself to live the first year afterward
on the proceeds of his practice; a device
of the time thought to be a wholesome corrective
of the corrupting influence of over-wealth
in young domesticities.
Although he had already chosen the sea
for his profession, and was a midshipman at
the time, with more of a reputation for living
than for learning, such was he, and such, it
may be said, was the incentive genius of his
choice, that almost before his resignation as
midshipman was accepted, his license as a
lawyer was signed. As for practice, it was
currently remarked at his wedding, at the
sight of him flying down the room in the reel
with his bride for partner, that his tongue
was as nimble as his heels, and that if he only
turned his attention to criminal practice, there
was no man in the country who would make
a better prosecuting attorney for the State.
And with him for prosecuting attorney, it
was warranted that sirrahs the highwaymen
would not continue to hold Georgia judge-and-jury
justice in quite such contemptible
estimation, and that the gallows would not be
left so long bereft of their legitimate
swingings. As for fees, it was predicted that
the young fellow as he stood, or rather
“chassé’d,”could snap his
fingers at both his
and his bride’s trustees.
He did turn his attention to criminal law,
was made prosecuting attorney for the State
in his county, and, before his six months had
passed, was convincing the hitherto high and
mighty, lordly, independent knights of the
road that other counties in Georgia furnished
more secure pasturage for them.
It was a beautiful spring morning. The
young wife bade him a hearty good-by, and
stood in the doorway watching him, gay and
debonair,
riding off, on his stout black
charger Beetle, in the direction of the town
in which court was to be held that week.
She herself feeling as full of ambition and
work as if she also were prosecuting attorney,
with a perennial spring of eloquence bubbling
in her brain, turned to her domestic duties,
and, without going into the detail of them, it
suffices to say that, according to the grandmother’s
estimation, one morning’s list of
duties for a healthy young bride of that
period would shame the week’s work of a
syndicate of them to-day. Finding herself
nearing the limit of diminution of several
household necessities, and the spring suggesting
the beginning of new ones, she made
up her mind to profit by her husband’s
absence and the fair weather to make a trading
visit to the neighboring town next day.
So, early in a morning as beautiful as the
preceding one, mounted on her own stanch
mare Maid Marion, she ambled down the
green over-hung forest-road, in the vista of
which she had watched her husband disappear
the day before; thinking about what she had
to buy, and thinking, no doubt, much more,
as brides will, of the absent lord and master
— as brides of those days loved to consider
and denominate their husbands.
Coming into the little town, the freshly
painted, swinging sign-board of the new
tavern,
“The Honest Georgian,” as usual was
the thing to catch her eye; but the instant
after what should she see but Black Beetle
hitched to the rack under the tree that
shadowed the hostelry!
It was not decorous; but she was young,
and the day of her first separation from her
husband had been so long; and was he not
also, against the firmest of resolutions and
plans, hastening back to her, the separation
being too long for him also?
Slipping her foot from the stirrup, she
jumped to the ground, and ran into the tavern.
There he stood calling hastily for a drink;
and her heart more than her eyes took in his,
to her, consecrated signalment — the
riding-boots, short clothes, blue coat, cocked hat,
ruffles. She crept up behind to surprise him,
her face, with its delight and smiles, beyond
her control. She crept, until she saw his
watch-fob dangling against the counter, and then
her heart made a call. He turned. He
was not her husband! Another man was in
her husband’s clothes, a man with a villainous
countenance! With a scream she gave the
alarm. The stranger turned, dropped his
drink, bounded to the door and out, leaped to
the back of Beetle, gave rein and spur, and
the black horse made good his reputation.
In a second all was hue-and-cry and pursuit.
While men and horses made, for all they were
worth, down the road after Beetle, she on
Maid Marion galloped for her life in the opposite
direction, the direction of the court town
whither her husband had journeyed. The
mare’s hide made acquaintance with the whip
that day if never before, for not even the
willing Maid Marion could keep pace with the
apprehensions on her back.
Scouring with her eyes the highway ahead
of her, shooting hawk’s glances into the forest
on each side of her, the wife rode through
the distance all, all day, praying that the day
might be long enough, might equal the distance.
The sun set, and night began to fall;
but she and Maid Marion were none the less
fresh, except in the heart.
The moon rose straight before them down
the road, lighting it and them through the
threatened obscurity. And so they came to
trampled earth and torn grass, and so she
uncovered concealed footsteps, and so, creeping
on her hands and knees, she followed traces
of blood, through thicket and glade, into the
deep forest, to a hastily piled hillock of
earth, gravel, and leaves. Burrowing with her
hands, she came to it, the naked body of her
young husband, cold and stiff, foully murdered.
Maid Marion approached at her call. She
wrapped him in her cloak, and — a young
wife of those times alone would do it — put
him in the saddle before her: the good mare
Maid Marion alone knows the rest. In the
early gray dawn, from one highway there rode
into the town the baffled pursuers, from the
other the grandmother’s grandmother, clasping
the corpse of her husband with arms as
stiff as his own; loving him, so the
grandmother used to say, with a love which, if
ever love could do so, would have effected a
resurrection.
THE OLD LADY’S RESTORATION
THE
news came out in the papers that
the old lady had been restored to her
fortune. She had been deprived of it so
long ago that the real manner of her
dispossession had become lost, or at least hidden
under the many versions that had been invented
to replace lapses of memory, or to
remedy the unpicturesqueness of the original
truth. The face of truth, like the face of
many a good woman, is liable to the accident
of ugliness, and the desire to embellish one
as well as the other need not necessarily
proceed from anything more harmful than
an overweighted love of the beautiful.
If the old lady had not been restored to
her fortune, her
personalia
would have remained in the oblivion which, as one might
say, had accumulated upon everything
belonging to her. But after that newspaper
paragraph, there was such a flowering of
memory around her name as would have
done credit to a whole cemetery on All
Saints. It took three generations to do
justice to the old lady, for so long and so
slow had been her descent into poverty that
a grandmother was needed to remember her
setting out upon the road to it.
She set out as most people do, well provided
with money, diamonds, pretty clothing,
handsome residence, equipage, opera-box,
beaus (for she was a widow), and so many,
many friends that she could never indulge
in a small party — she always had to give
a grand ball to accommodate them. She
made quite an occasion of her first reverse, —
some litigation decided against her, — and
said it came from the court’s having only
one ear, and that preëmpted by the other
party.
She always said whatever she thought,
regardless of the consequences, because she
averred truth was so much more interesting
than falsehood. Nothing annoyed her more
in society than to have to listen to the
compositions women make as a substitute for
the original truth. It was as if, when she
went to the theater to hear Shakspere and
Molière, the actors should try to impose upon
the audience by reciting lines of their own.
Truth was the wit of life and the wit of
books. She traveled her road from affluence
so leisurely that nothing escaped her eyes
or her feelings, and she signaled unhesitatingly
every stage in it.
“My dear, do you know there is really
such a thing as existence without a carriage
and horses?” — “I assure you it is perfectly
new to me to find that an opera-box is not
a necessity. It is a luxury. In theory one
can really never tell the distinction between
luxuries and necessities.” — “How absurd!
At one time I thought hair was given us
only to furnish a profession to hair-dressers;
just as we wear artificial flowers to support
the flower-makers.” — “Upon my word, it
is not uninteresting. There is always some
haute nouveauté
in economy. The ways of depriving one’s
self are infinite. There is
wine, now.” — “Not own your residence!
As soon not own your tomb as your
residence! My mama used to scream that in
my ears. According to her, it was not
comme il faut
to board or live in a rented
house. How little she knew!”
When her friends, learning her increasing
difficulties, which they did from the best
authority (herself), complimented her, as they
were forced to do, upon her still handsome
appearance, pretty laces, feathers, jewelry,
silks, “Fat,”she would answer — “fat. I am
living off my fat, as bears do in winter. In
truth, I remind myself of an animal in more
ways than one.”
And so every one had something to contribute
to the conversation about her — bits
which, they said, affection and admiration
had kept alive in their memory.
Each city has its own roads to certain ends,
its ways of Calvary, so to speak. In New
Orleans the victim seems ever to walk down
Royal street and up Chartres, or
vice versa.
One would infer so, at least, from the display
in the shops and windows of those thoroughfares.
Old furniture, cut glass, pictures,
books, jewelry, lace, china — the fleece (sometimes
the flesh still sticking to it) left on the
brambles by the driven herd. If there should
some day be a trump of resurrection for
defunct fortunes, those shops would be emptied
in the same twinkling of the eye allowed to
tombs for their rendition of property.
The old lady must have made that promenade
many, many times, to judge by the samples
of her “fat or fleece” displayed in the
windows. She took to hobbling, as if from
tired or sore feet.
“It is nothing,” in answer to an inquiry.
“Made-to-order feet learning to walk in
ready-made shoes: that is all. One’s feet,
after all, are the most unintelligent part of
one’s body.” Tea was her abomination,
coffee her adoration; but she explained: “Tea,
you know, is so detestable that the very
worst is hardly worse than the very best;
while coffee is so perfect that the smallest
shade of impurity is not to be tolerated. The
truly economical, I observe, always drink tea.”
“At one time I thought if all the luxuries of
the world were exposed to me, and but one
choice allowed, I should select gloves.
Believe me, there is no superfluity in the world
so easily dispensed with.”
As may be supposed her path led her
farther and farther away from her old friends.
Even her intimates became scarce; so much
so, that these observations, which, of course,
could be made only to intimates, became
fewer and fewer, unfortunately, for her
circumstances were becoming such that the
remarks became increasingly valuable. The
last thing related of her was apropos of
friends.
“My friends! My dear, I cannot tell you
just so, on the spur of the moment, but with
a little reflection and calculation I could tell
you, to a picayune, the rent of every friend
in the market. You can lease, rent, or hire
them, like horses, carriages, opera-boxes, servants,
by year, month, day, or hour; and the
tariff is just as fixed.
“Christians! Christians are the most discreet
people in the world. If you should ask
me what Christianity has most promoted in
the world, I should answer without hesitation,
discretion. Of course, when I say the world
I mean society, and when I say Christianity I
mean our interpretation of it. If only duns
could be pastors, and pastors duns! But of
course you do not know what duns are; they
are the guardian angels of the creditor, the
pursuing fiends of the debtor.”
After that, the old lady made her disappearance
under the waves of that sea into the
depths of which it is very improbable that a
single friend ever attempted to pursue her.
And there she remained until the news came
that she was restored to fortune.
A week passed, two weeks; no sight or
sound of her. It was during this period that
her old friends were so occupied resuscitating
their old friendships for her — when all her
antique sayings and doings became current
ball-room and dinner-table gossip — that she
arose from her obscurity like Cinderella from
her ashes, to be decked with every gift that
fairy minds could suggest. Those who had
known her intimately made no effort to
conceal their importance. Those who did not
know her personally put forward claims of
inherited friendship, and those who did not
know her traditionally or otherwise — the
nouveaux riches
and parvenus,
who alone feel the moneyed value of such social
connections — began making their resolutions to
capture her as soon as she came in sight of
society.
The old residence was to be rebought, and
refurnished from France; the
avant scène
at
the opera had been engaged; the old cook
was to be hired back from the club at a
fabulous price; the old balls and the old dinners
were to gladden the city — so said they who
seemed to know. Nothing was to be spared,
nothing stinted — at her age, with no child or
relative, and life running short for pleasure.
Diamonds, laces, velvets, champagne, Chateau
Yquem — “Grand Dieu Seigneur!” the old
Creole servants exclaimed, raising their hands
at the enumeration of it.
Where the news came from nobody knew,
but everything was certified and accepted as
facts, although, as between women, the grain
of salt should have been used. Impatience
waxed, until nearly every day some one
would ring the bell of the old residence, to
ask when the mistress was going to move in.
And such affectionate messages! And people
would not, simply could not, be satisfied with
the incomprehensible answers. And then it
leaked out. The old lady was simply waiting
for everything to arrive — furniture, toilets,
carriage, etc. — to make a grand
entrée into her
old sphere; to come riding on a throne,
as it were. And still the time passed, and
she did not come. Finally two of the
clever-heads penetrated the enigma:
mauvaise honte,
shyness — so long out of the world, so
old; perhaps not sure of her welcome. So
they determined to seek her out.
“We will go to her, like children to a
grandmother, etc. The others have no
delicacy of sentiment, etc. And she will
thus learn who really remember, really
love her, etc.”
Provided with congratulatory bouquets,
they set forth. It is very hard to find a
dweller on the very sea-bottom of poverty.
Perhaps that is why the effort is so seldom
made. One has to ask at grocers’ shops,
groggeries, market-stalls, Chinese restaurants;
interview corner cobblers, ragpickers,
gutter children. But nothing is impossible to
the determined. The two ladies overcame
all obstacles, and needled their way along,
where under other circumstances they would
not have glanced, would have thought it
improper to glance.
They were directed through an old, old
house, out on an old, old gallery, to a room
at the very extreme end.
“Poor thing! Evidently she has not heard
the good news yet. We will be the first to
communicate it,” they whispered, standing
before the dilapidated, withered-looking door.
Before knocking, they listened, as it is the
very wisdom of discretion to do. There was
life inside, a little kind of voice, like some one
trying to hum a song with a very cracked old
throat.
The ladies opened the door. “Ah, my
friend!”
“Ah, my friend”
“Restored!”
“Restored!”
“At last!”
“At last!”
“Just the same!”
“Exactly the same!”
It was which one would get to her first
with bouquet and kiss, competition almost
crowding friendship.
“The good news!”
“The good news!”
“We could not stay!”
“We had to come!”
“It has arrived at last!”
“At last it has arrived!”
The old lady was very much older, but still
the same.
“You will again have a chance!”
“Restored to your friends!”
“The world!”
“Your luxuries!”
“Your comforts!”
“Comforts! Luxuries!” At last the old
lady had an opportunity to slip in a word.
“And friends! You say right.”
There was a pause — a pause which held
not a small measure of embarrassment. But
the two visitors, although they were women
of the world, and so dreaded an embarrassment
more than they did sin, had prepared
themselves even to stand this.
The old lady standing there — she was very
much thinner, very much bent, but still the
same — appeared to be looking not at them,
but at their enumeration.
“Comfort!” She opened a pot bubbling
on the fire. “Bouillon! A good five-cent
bouillon. Luxury!” She picked up something
from a chair, a handful of new cotton
chemises. “Luxury!” She turned back her
bedspread: new cotton sheets. “Did you
ever lie in your bed at night and dream of
sheets? Comfort! Luxury! I should say so!
And friends! My dear, look!” Opening her
door, pointing to an opposite gallery, to the
yard, her own gallery; to the washing, ironing,
sewing women, the cobbling, chair-making,
carpentering men; to the screaming,
laughing, crying, quarreling, swarming
children. “Friends! All friends — friends for
fifteen years. Ah, yes, indeed! We are all
glad — elated in fact. As you say I am
restored.”
The visitors simply reported that they had
found the old lady, and that she was imbecile;
mind completely gone under stress of poverty
and old age. Their opinion was that
she should be interdicted.
A DELICATE AFFAIR
“BUT
what does this extraordinary display
of light mean?” ejaculated my aunt, the
moment she entered the parlor from the
dining-room. “It looks like the kingdom of
heaven in here! Jules! Jules!” she called,
“come and put out some of the light!”
Jules was at the front door letting in the
usual Wednesday-evening visitor, but now he
came running in immediately with his own
invention in the way of a gas-stick, — a piece
of broom-handle notched at the end, — and
began turning one tap after the other, until
the room was reduced to complete darkness.
“But what do you mean now, Jules?”
screamed the old lady again.
“Pardon, madame,” answered Jules, with
dignity; “it is an accident. I thought there
was one still lighted.”
“An accident! An accident! Do you
think I hire you to perform accidents for me?
You are just through telling me that it was
accident made you give me both soup and
gumbo for dinner to-day.”
“But accidents can always happen, madame,”
persisted Jules, adhering to his position.
The chandelier, a design of originality in its
day, gave light by what purported to be wax
candles standing each in a circlet of pendant
crystals. The usual smile of ecstatic
admiration spread over Jules’s features as he
touched the match to the simulated wicks,
and lighted into life the rainbows in the prisms
underneath. It was a smile that did not heighten
the intelligence of his features, revealing
as it did the toothless condition of his gums.
“What will madame have for her dinner
to-morrow,” looking benignantly at his
mistress, and still standing under his aureole.
“Do I ever give orders for one dinner,
with the other one still on my lips?”
“I only asked madame; there is no harm
in asking.” He walked away, his long stiff
white apron rattling like a petticoat about
him. Catching sight of the visitor still
standing at the threshold: “Oh, madame, here is
Mr. Horace. Shall I let him in?”
“Idiot! Every Wednesday you ask me
that question, and every Wednesday I answer
the same way. Don’t you think I could tell
you when not to let him in without your
asking?”
“Oh, well, madame, one never knows; it
is always safe to ask.”
The appearance of the gentleman started a
fresh subject of excitement.
“Jules! Jules! You have left that front
door unlocked again!”
“Excuse me,” said Mr. Horace; “Jules did
not leave the front door unlocked. It was
locked when I rang, and he locked it again
most carefully after letting me in. I have
been standing outside all the while the gas
was being extinguished and relighted.”
“Ah, very well, then. And what is the
news?” She sank into her arm-chair, pulled
her little card-table closer, and began
shuffling the cards upon it for her game of
solitaire. “I never hear any news, you
know. She [nodding toward me] goes out,
but she never learns anything. She is as
stupid to-night as an empty bottle.”
After a few passes her hands, which were
slightly tremulous, regained some of their
wonted steadiness and brilliancy of movement,
and the cards dropped rapidly on the
table. Mr. Horace, as he had got into the
habit of doing, watched her mechanically,
rather absent-mindedly retailing what he
imagined would interest her, from his week’s
observation and hearsay. And madame’s
little world revolved, complete for her, in
time, place, and personality.
It was an old-fashioned square room with
long ceiling, and broad, low windows heavily
curtained with stiff silk brocade, faded by
time into mellowness. The tall white-painted
mantel carried its obligation of ornaments
well: a gilt clock which under a glass case
related some brilliant poetical idyl, and told
the hours only in an insignificant aside,
according to the delicate politeness of bygone
French taste; flanked by duplicate continuations
of the same idyl in companion candelabra,
also under glass; Sèvres, or imitation
Sèvres vases, and a crowd of smaller objects
to which age and rarity were slowly
contributing an artistic value. An oval mirror
behind threw replicas of them into another
mirror, receiving in exchange the reflected
portrait of madame in her youth, and in the
partial nudity in which innocence was limned
in madame’s youth. There were besides
mirrors on the other three walls of the room,
all hung with such careful intent for the
exercise of their vocation that the apartment,
in spots, extended indefinitely; the brilliant
chandelier was thereby quadrupled, and the
furniture and ornaments multiplied everywhere
and most unexpectedly into twins and
triplets, producing such sociabilities among
them, and forcing such correspondences
between inanimate objects with such hospitable
insistence, that the effect was full of gaiety
and life, although the interchange in reality
was the mere repetition of one original, a
kind of phonographic echo.
The portrait of monsieur, madame’s handsome
young husband, hung out of the circle
of radiance, in the isolation that, wherever
they hang, always seems to surround the
portraits of the dead.
Old has the parlors appeared, madame
antedated them by the sixteen years she had
lived before her marriage, which had been
the occasion of their furnishment. She had
traveled a considerable distance over the
sands of time since the epoch commemorated
by the portrait. Indeed, it would require
almost documentary evidence to prove that
she, who now was arriving at eighty, was the
same Atalanta that had started out so
buoyantly at sixteen.
Instead of a cap, she wore black lace over
her head, pinned with gold brooches. Her
white hair curled naturally over a low forehead.
Her complexion showed care — and
powder. Her eyes were still bright, not
with the effete intelligence of old age, but
with actual potency. She wore a loose black
sack flowered in purple, and over that a
black lace mantle, fastened with more gold
brooches.
She played her game of solitaire rapidly,
impatiently, and always won; for she never
hesitated to cheat to get out of a tight place,
or into a favorable one, cheating with the
quickness of a flash, and forgetting it the
moment afterward.
Mr. Horace was as old as she, but he
looked much younger, although his dress and
appearance betrayed no evidence of an effort
in that direction. Whenever his friend
cheated, he would invariably call her attention
to it; and as usual she would, shrug her
shoulders, and say, “Bah! lose a game for a
card!” and pursue the conversation.
He happened to mention mushrooms —
fresh mushrooms. She threw down her cards
before the words were out of his mouth, and
began to call, “Jules! Jules!” Mr. Horace
pulled the bell-cord, but madame was too
excitable for that means of communication.
She ran into the antechamber, and put her
head over the banisters, calling, “Jules!
Jules!” louder and louder. She might have
heard Jules’s slippered feet running from the
street into the corridor and up-stairs, had she
not been so deaf He appeared at the door.
“But where have you been? Here I have
been raising the house a half-hour, calling
you. You have been in the street. I am
sure you have been in the street.”
“Madame is very much mistaken,” answered
Jules, with resentful dignity. He had
taken off his white apron of waiter, and was
disreputable in all the shabbiness of his attire
as cook. “When madame forbids me to go
into the street, I do not go into the street. I
was in the kitchen; I had fallen asleep.
What does madame desire?” smiling benevolently.
“What is this I hear? Fresh mushrooms
in the market!”
“Eh, madame?”
“Fresh mushrooms in the market, and you
have not brought me any!”
“Madame, there are fresh mushrooms
everywhere in the market,” waving his hand
to show their universality.
“Everybody is eating them — ”
“Old Pomponnette,” Jules continued, “only
this morning offered me a plate, piled up
high, for ten cents.”
“Idiot! Why did you not buy them?”
“If madame had said so; but madame did
not say so. Madame said, ‘Soup, Jules;
carrots, rice,’” counting on his fingers.
“And the gumbo?”
“I have explained that that was an
accident. Madame said ’Soup,’” enumerating
his menu again; “madame never once said
mushrooms.”
“But how could I know there were mushrooms
in the market? Do I go to market?”
“That is it!” and Jules smiled at the
question thus settled.
“If you had told me there were mushrooms
in the market — ” pursued madame, persisting
in treating Jules as a reasonable being.
“Why did not madame ask me? If
madame had asked me, surely I would have
told madame. Yesterday Cæsar brought
them to the door — whole bucketful for
twenty-five cents. I had to shut the door in
his face to get rid of him,” triumphantly.
“And you brought me yesterday those
detestable peas!”
“Ah,” shrugging his shoulders, “madame
told me to buy what I saw. I saw peas. I
bought them.”
“Well, understand now, once for all: whenever
you see mushrooms, no matter what I
ordered, you buy them. Do you hear?”
“No, madame. Surely I cannot buy mushrooms
unless madame orders them. Madame’s
disposition is too quick.”
“But I do order them. Stupid! I do order
them. I tell you to buy them every day.”
“And if there are none in the market
every day?”
“Go away! Get out of my sight! I do not
want to see you. Ah, it is unendurable! I
must — I must get rid of him!” This last was
not a threat, as Jules knew only too well. It
was merely a habitual exclamation.
During the colloquy Mr. Horace, leaning
back in his arm-chair, raised his eyes, and
caught the reflected portrait of madame in
the mirror before him — the reflection so
much softer and prettier, so much more
ethereal, than the original painting. Indeed,
seen in the mirror, that way, the portrait was
as refreshing as the most charming memory.
He pointed to it when madame, with considerable
loss of temper, regained her seat.
“It is as beautiful as the past,” he
explained most unnaturally, for he and his
friend had a horror of looking at the long,
long past, which could not fail to remind
them of — what no one cares to contemplate
out of church. Making an effort toward
some determination which a subtle observer
might have noticed weighing upon him all
the evening, he added: “And, apropos of
the past — ”
“Hein?”
interrogated the old lady, impatiently,
still under the influence of her irascibility
about the mushrooms.
He moved his chair closer, and bent
forward, as if his communication were to be
confidential.
“Ah, bah! Speak louder!” she cried.
“One would suppose you had some secret to
tell. What secrets can there be at our age?”
She took up her cards and began to play.
There could be no one who bothered herself
less about the forms of politeness.
“Yes, yes,” answered Mr. Horace, throwing
himself back into his chair; “what secrets
can there be at our age?”
The remark seemed a pregnant one to
him; he gave himself up to it. One must
evidently be the age of one’s thoughts. Mr.
Horace’s thoughts revealed him the old man
he was. The lines in his face deepened into
wrinkles; his white mustache could not
pretend to conceal his mouth, worsened by the
loss of a tooth or two; and the long, thin
hand that propped his head was crossed with
blue, distended veins. “At the last
judgment” — it was a favorite quotation with him
— “the book of our conscience will be read
aloud before the whole company.”
But the old lady, deep in her game, paid
no more heed to his quotation than to him.
He made a gesture toward her portrait.
“When that was painted, Josephine — ”
Madame threw a glance after the gesture.
The time was so long ago, the mythology of
Greece hardly more distant! At eighty
the golden age of youth must indeed appear
an evanescent myth. Madame’s ideas seemed
to take that direction.
“Ah, at that time we were all nymphs,
and you all demigods.”
“Demigods and nymphs, yes; but there
was one among us who was a god with
you all.”
The allusion — a frequent one with Mr.
Horace — was to madame’s husband, who in
his day, it is said, had indeed played the god
in the little Arcadia of society. She shrugged
her shoulders. The truth is so little of a
compliment. The old gentleman sighed in
an abstracted way, and madame, although
apparently absorbed in her game, lent her
ear. It is safe to say that a woman is
never too old to hear a sigh wafted in her
direction.
“Josephine, do you remember — in your
memory — ”
She pretended not to hear. Remember?
Who ever heard of her forgetting? But she
was not the woman to say, at a moment’s
notice, what she remembered or what she
forgot.
“A woman’s memory! When I think of
a woman’s memory — in fact, I do not like to
think of a woman’s memory. One can
intrude in imagination into many places; but a
woman’s memory — ”
Mr. Horace seemed to lose his thread. It
had been said of him in his youth that he
wrote poetry — and it was said against him.
It was evidently such lapses as these that
had given rise to the accusation. And as
there was no one less impatient under
sentiment or poetry than madame, her feet began
to agitate themselves as if Jules were
perorating some of his culinary inanities before her.
“And a man’s memory!” totally
misunderstanding him. “It is not there that I either
would penetrate, my friend. A man — ”
When madame began to talk about men
she was prompted by imagination just as
much as was Mr. Horace when he talked
about women. But what a difference in their
sentiments! And yet he had received so
little, and she so much, from the subjects of
their inspiration. But that seems to be the
way in life — or in Imagination.
“That you should” — he paused with the
curious shyness of the old before the word
“love” — “that you two should — marry —
seemed natural, inevitable, at the time.”
Tradition records exactly the same comment
by society at the time on the marriage
in question. Society is ever fatalistic in its
comments.
“But the natural — the inevitable — do we
not sometimes, I wonder, perform them as
Jules does his accidents?”
“Ah, do not talk about that idiot! An
idiot born and bred! I won’t have him about
me! He is a monstrosity! I tell his grandmother
that every day when she comes to
comb me. What a farce — what a ridiculous
farce comfortable existence has become with
us! Fresh mushrooms in market, and bring
me carrots!”
The old gentleman, partly from long
knowledge of her habit, or from an equally
persistent bend of his own, quietly held on
to his idea.
“One cannot tell. It seems so at the
time. We like to think it so; it makes it
easier. And yet, looking back on our future
as we once looked forward to it — ”
“Eh! but who wants to look back on it,
my friend? Who in the world wants to look
back on it?” One could not doubt madame’s
energy of opinion on that question to hear
her voice. “We have done our future, we
have performed it, if you will. Our future!
It is like the dinners we have eaten; of
course we cannot remember the good without
becoming exasperated over the bad:
but — ” shrugging her shoulders — “since
we cannot beat the cooks, we must submit
to fate,” forcing a queen that she needed at
the critical point of her game.
“At sixteen and twenty-one it is hard to
realize that one is arranging one’s life to last
until sixty, seventy, forever,” correcting himself
as he thought of his friend, the dead husband.
If madame had ever possessed the art
of self-control, it was many a long day-since
she had exercised it; now she frankly began
to show ennui.
“When I look back to that time,” — Mr.
Horace leaned back in his chair and half
closed his eyes, perhaps to avoid the expression
of her face, — “I see nothing but lights
and flowers, I hear nothing but music and
laughter; and all — lights and flowers and
music and laughter — seem to meet in this
room, where we met so often to arrange our
— inevitabilities.” The word appeared to
attract him. “Josephine,” — with a sudden
change of voice and manner, — “Josephine,
how beautiful you were!”
The old lady nodded her head without
looking from her cards.
“They used to say,” with sad conviction of
the truth of his testimony — “the men used to
say that your beauty was irresistible. None
ever withstood you. None ever could.”
That, after all, was Mr. Horace’s great
charm with madame; he was so faithful to
the illusions of his youth. As he looked now
at her, one could almost feel the irresistibility
of which he spoke.
“It was only their excuse, perhaps; we
could not tell at the time; we cannot tell
even now when we think about it. They
said then, talking as men talk over such
things, that you were the only one who could
remain yourself under the circumstances;
you were the only one who could know, who
could will, under the circumstances. It was
their theory; men can have only theories
about such things.” His voice dropped, and
he seemed to drop too, into some abysm of
thought.
Madame looked into the mirror, where she
could see the face of the one who alone could
retain her presence of mind under the
circumstances suggested by Mr. Horace. She
could also have seen, had she wished it,
among the reflected bric-a-brac of the mantel,
the corner of the frame that held the
picture of her husband, but peradventure,
classing it with the past which held so many
unavenged bad dinners, she never thought to
link it even by a look with her emotions of
the present. Indeed, it had been said of her
that in past, present, and future there had
ever been but the one picture to interest her
eyes — the one she was looking at now.
This, however, was the remark of the
uninitiated, for the true passion of a beautiful
woman is never so much for her beauty as
for its booty; as the passion of a gamester is
for his game, not for his luck.
“How beautiful she was!”
It was apparently down in the depths of
his abysm that he found the connection
between this phrase and his last, and it was
evidently to himself he said it. Madame,
however, heard and understood too; in fact,
traced back to a certain period, her thoughts
and Mr. Horace’s must have been fed by
pretty much the same subjects. But she had
she carefully barricaded certain-issues in her
memory as almost to obstruct their flow into
her life; if she were a cook, one would say
that it was her bad dinners which she was
trying to keep out of remembrance.
“You there, he there, she there, I there.”
He pointed to the places on the carpet, under
the chandelier; he could have touched them
with a walking-stick, and the recollection
seemed just as close.
“She was, in truth, what we men called
her then; it was her eyes that first suggested
it — Myosotis, the little blue flower, the
forget-me-not. It suited her better than her
own name. We always called her that
among ourselves. How beautiful she was!”
He leaned his head on his hand and looked
where he had seen her last — so long, such
an eternity, ago.
It must be explained for the benefit of
those who do not live in the little world where
an allusion is all that is necessary to put one
in full possession of any drama, domestic or
social, that Mr. Horace was speaking of the
wedding-night of madame, when the bridal
party stood as he described under the
chandelier; the bride and groom, with each one’s
best friend. It may be said that it was the
last night or time that madame had a best
friend of her own sex. Social gossip, with
characteristic kindness, had furnished reasons
to suit all tastes, why madame had ceased
that night to have a best friend of her own
sex. If gossip had not done so, society would
still be left to its imagination for information,
for madame never tolerated the smallest
appeal to her for enlightenment. What the
general taste seemed most to relish as a
version was that madame in her marriage had
triumphed, not conquered; and that the night
of her wedding she had realized the fact, and,
to be frank, had realized it ever since. In short,
madame had played then to gain at love, as
she played now to gain at solitaire; and
hearts were no more than cards to her — and,
“Bah! Lose a game for a card!” must have
been always her motto. It is hard to explain
it delicately enough, for these are the most
delicate affairs in life; but the image of Myosotis
had passed through monsieur’s heart,
and Myosotis does mean “forget me not.”
And madame well knew that to love monsieur
once was to love him always, in spite of jealousy,
doubt, distrust, nay, unhappiness (for to
love him meant all this and more). He was
that kind of man, they said, whom women
could love even against conscience. Madame
never forgave that moment. Her
friend, at least, she could put aside out of her
intercourse; unfortunately, we cannot put
people out of our lives. God alone can do
that, and so far he had interfered in the
matter only by removing monsieur. It was
known to notoriety that since her wedding
madame had abandoned, destroyed, all knowledge
of her friend. And the friend? She
had disappeared as much as is possible for
one in her position and with her duties.
“What there is in blue eyes, light hair, and
a fragile form to impress one, I cannot tell;
but for us men it seems to me it is blue-eyed,
light-haired, and fragile-formed women that
are the hardest to forget.”
“The less easy to forget,” corrected
madame; but he paid no attention to the
remark.
“They are the women that attach
themselves in one’s memory. If necessary to
keep from being forgotten, they come back
into one’s dreams. And as life rolls on, one
wonders about them, — ‘Is she happy? Is
she miserable? Goes life well or ill with
her?’ ”
Madame played her cards slowly, one
would say, for her, prosaically.
“And there is always a pang when, as one
is so wondering, the response comes, — that
is, the certainty in one’s heart responds, —
‘She is miserable, and life goes ill with
her.’ Then, if ever, men envy the power
of God.”
Madame threw over the game she was in,
and began a new one.
“Such women should not be unhappy;
they are too fragile, too sensitive, too
trusting. I could never understand the infliction
of misery upon them. I could send death to
them, but not — not misfortune.”
Madame, forgetting again to cheat in time,
and losing her game, began impatiently to
shuffle her cards for a new deal.
“And yet, do you know, Josephine, those
women are the unhappy ones of life. They
seem predestined to it, as others” — looking
at madame’s full-charmed portrait — “are
predestined to triumph and victory. They”
— unconscious, in his abstraction, of the
personal nature of his simile — “never know
how to handle their cards, and they always
play a losing game.”
“Ha!” came from madame, startled into
an irate ejaculation.
“It is their love always that is sacrificed,
their hearts always that are bruised. One
might say that God himself favors the
black-haired ones!”
As his voice sank lower and lower, the
room seemed to become stiller and stiller.
A passing vehicle in the street, however, now
and then drew a shiver of sound from the
pendent prisms of the chandelier.
“She was so slight, so fragile, and always
in white, with blue in her hair to match her
eyes — and — God knows what in her heart,
all the time. And yet they stand it, they
bear it, they do not die, they live along with
the strongest, the happiest, the most fortunate
of us,” bitterly; “and” — raising his eyes
to his old friend, who thereupon immediately
began to fumble her cards — “whenever in
the street I see a poor, bent, broken woman’s
figure, I know, without verifying it any more
by a glance, that it is the wreck of a fair
woman’s figure; whenever I hear of a bent,
broken existence, I know, without asking
any more, that it is the wreck of a fair
woman’s life.”
Poor Mr. Horace spoke with the unreason
of a superstitious bigot.
“I have often thought, since, in large
assemblies, particularly in weddings,
Josephine, of what was going on in the women’s
hearts there, and I have felt sorry for them;
and when I think of God’s knowing what
is in their hearts, I have felt sorry for the
men. And I often think now, Josephine, —
I think oftener and oftener of it, — that if the
resurrection trumpet of our childhood should
sound some day, no matter when, out there,
over the old St. Louis cemetery, and we
should all have to rise from our long rest
of oblivion, what would be the first thing
we should do? And though there were a
God and a heaven awaiting us, — by that
same God, Josephine, I believe that our
first thought in awakening would be the
last in dying, — confession, — and that our
first rush would be to the feet of one
another for forgiveness. For there are some
offenses that must outlast the longest
oblivion, and a forgiveness that will be more
necessary than God’s own. Then our hearts
will be bared to one another; for if, as
you say, there are no secrets at our age,
there can still be less cause for them after
death.”
His voice ended in the faintest whisper.
The table crashed over, and the cards flew
wide-spread on the floor. Before we could
recover, madame was in the antechamber,
screaming for Jules.
One would have said that, from her face,
the old lady had witnessed the resurrection
described by Mr. Horace, the rush of the
spirits with their burdens of remorse, the one
to the feet of the other; and she must have
seen herself and her husband, with a
unanimity of purpose never apparent in their
short married life, rising from their common
tomb and hastening to that other tomb at the
end of the alley, and falling at the feet of the
one to whom in life he had been recreant in
love, she in friendship.
Of course Jules answered through the
wrong door, rushing in with his gas-stick, and
turning off the gas. In a moment we were
involved in darkness and dispute.
“But what does he mean? What does the
idiot mean? He — ” It was impossible for
her to find a word to do justice to him and to
her exasperation at the same time.
“Pardon, madame; it is not I. It is the
cathedral bell; it is ringing nine o’clock.
“But — ”
“Madame can hear it herself. Listen!”
We could not see it, but we were conscious of
the benign, toothless smile spreading over
his face as the bell-tones fell in the room.
“But it is not the gas. I — ”
“Pardon, madame; but it is the gas. Madame
said, ‘Jules, put out the gas every night
when the bell rings.’ Madame told me that
only last night. The bell rings: I put out
the gas.”
“Will you be silent? Will you listen?”
“If madame wishes; just as madame says.”
But the old lady had turned to Mr. Horace.
“Horace, you have seen — you know — ” and
it was a question now of overcoming emotion.
“I — I — I — a carriage, my friend, a
carriage.
“Madame — ” Jules interrupted his smile
to interrupt her.
She was walking around the room, picking
up a shawl here, a lace there; for she was
always prepared against draughts.
“Madame — ” continued Jules, pursuing
her.
“A carriage.”
“If madame would only listen, I was going
to say — but madame is too quick in her
disposition — the carriage has been waiting
since a long hour ago. Mr. Horace said to
have it there in a half hour.”
It was then she saw for the first time that
it had all been prepared by Mr. Horace.
The rest was easy enough: getting into the
carriage, and finding the place of which Mr.
Horace had heard, as he said, only that
afternoon. In it, on her bed of illness,
poverty, and suffering, lay the patient, wasted
form of the beautiful fair one whom men had
called in her youth Myosotis.
But she did not call her Myosotis.
“Mon
Amour!” The old pet name, although
it had to be fetched across more than
half a century of disuse, flashed like lightning
from madame’s heart into the dim chamber.
“Ma
Divine!”came in counter-flash from
the curtained bed.
In the old days women, or at least young
girls, could hazard such pet names one upon
the other. These — think of it! — dated from
the first communion class, the dating period
of so much of friendship.
“My poor Amour!”
“My poor, poor Divine!”
The voices were together, close beside the
pillow.
“I — I — ” began Divine.
“It could not have happened if God had
not wished it,” interrupted poor Amour, with
the resignation that comes, alas! only with
the last drop of the bitter cup.
And that was about all. If Mr. Horace
had not slipped away, he might have noticed
the curious absence of monsieur’s name, and
of his own name, in the murmuring that
followed. It would have given him some more
ideas on the subject of woman.
At any rate, the good God must thank him
for having one affair the less to arrange when
the trumpet sounds out there over the old St.
Louis cemetery. And he was none too
premature; for the old St. Louis cemetery, as
was shortly enough proved, was a near reach
for all three of the old friends.
PUPASSE
EVERY
day, every day, it was the same
overture in Madame Joubert’s room in
the Institut St. Denis; the strident:
“Mesdemoiselles; à vos places!
Notre Père
qui est dans le ciel — Qui a fait ce bruit?”
“It’s Pupasse, madame! It’s Pupasse!”
The answer invariably was unanimous.
“But, Madame Joubert, — I assure you,
Madame Joubert, — I could not help it!
They know I could not help it!”
By this time the fresh new fool’s cap made
from yesterday’s
“Bee”
would have been
pinned on her head.
“Quelle injustice! Quelle
injustice!”
This last apostrophe in a high, whining
nasal voice, always procured Pupasse’s
elevation on the tall three-legged stool in the
corner.
It was a theory of the little girls in the
primary class that Madame Joubert would be
much more lenient to their own little
inevitabilities of bad conduct and lessons if
Pupasse did not invariably comb her the wrong
way every morning after prayers, by dropping
something, or sniffling, or sneezing. Therefore,
while they distractedly got together
books, slates, and copy-books, their infantile
eyes found time to dart deadly reproaches
toward the corner of penitence, and their
little lips, still shaped from their first
nourishment, pouted anything but sympathy for the
occupant of it.
Indeed, it would have been a most startling
unreality to have ever entered Madame
Joubert’s room and not seen Pupasse in that
corner, on that stool, her tall figure shooting up
like a post, until her tall, pointed
bonnet d’ âne
came within an inch or two of the ceiling. It
was her hoop-skirt that best testified to her
height. It was the period of those funnel-shaped
hoop-skirts that spread out with such
nice mathematical proportions, from the waist
down, that it seemed they must have emanated
from the brains of astronomers, like the
orbits, and diameters, and other things belonging
to the heavenly bodies. Pupasse could
not have come within three feet of the wall
with her hoop-skirt distended. To have
forced matters was not to be thought of an
instant. So even in her greatest grief and
indignation, she had to pause before the
three-legged black stool, and gather up steel
after steel of her circumference in her hands
behind, until her calico skirt careened and
flattened; and so she could manage to
accommodate herself to the limited space of her
punishment, the circles drooping far over her
feet as she stood there, looking like the
costumed stick of a baby’s rattle.
Her thinness continued into her face,
which, unfortunately, had nothing in the way
of toilet to assist it. Two little black eyes
fixed in the sides of a mere fence of a nose,
and a mouth with the shape and expression
of all mouths made to go over sharp-pointed
teeth planted very far apart; the smallest
amount possible of fine, dry, black hair — a
perfect rat-tail when it was plaited in one, as
almost all wore their hair. But sometimes
Pupasse took it into her head to plait it in two
braids, as none but the thick-haired ventured
to wear it. As the little girls said, it was a
petition to Heaven for
“eau Quinquina.”
When Marcelite, the hair-dresser, came at
her regular periods to visit the hair of the
boarders, she would make an effort with
Pupasse, plaiting her hundred hairs in a
ten-strand braid. The effect was a half yard of
black worsted galloon; more, or better.
Had Pupasse possessed as many heads
as the hydra, she could have “coiffe’d”
them all with fools’ caps during one
morning’s recitations. She entirely monopolized
the “Daily Bee.” Madame Joubert was
forced to borrow from “madame” the stale
weekly
“Courrier des Etats-Unis”
for the rest of the room.
From grammar, through
sacred history, arithmetic, geography,
mythology, down to dictation, Pupasse could pile
up an accumulation of penitences that would
have tasked the limits of the current day had
not recreation been wisely set as a term
which disbarred, by proscription, previous
offenses. But even after recreation, with that
day’s lessons safely out, punished and
expiated, Pupasse’s doom seemed scarcely
lightened; there was still a whole criminal code of
conduct to infract. The only difference was
that instead of books, slates, or copy-books,
leathern medals, bearing various legends and
mottos, were hung around her neck — a
travestied decoration worse than the books for
humiliation.
The
“abécédaires,”
their torment for the
day over, thankful for any distraction from
the next day’s lessons, and eager for any
relief from the intolerable ennui of goodness,
were thankful enough now for Pupasse.
They naturally watched her in preference to
Madame Joubert, holding their books and
slates quite cunningly to hide their faces.
Pupasse had not only the genius, but that
which sometimes fails genius, the means for
grimacing: little eyes, long nose, foolish
mouth, and pointed tongue. And she was
so amusing, when Madame Joubert’s head
was turned, that the little girls, being young
and innocent, would forget themselves and
all burst out laughing. It sounded like a
flight of singing birds through the hot, close,
stupid little room; but not so to Madame
Joubert.
“Young ladies! But what does this
mean?”
And, terror-stricken, the innocents would
call out with one voice, “It’s Pupasse,
madame! It’s Pupasse who made us laugh!”
There was nothing but fools’ caps to be
gained by prevaricating, and there was
frequently nothing less gained by confession.
And oh, the wails and the sobs as the innocents
would be stood up, one by one, in their
places! Even the pigtails at the backs of
their little heads were convulsed with grief.
Oh, how they hated Pupasse then! When
their
bonnes
came for them at three o’clock, —
washing their tear-stained faces at the cistern
before daring to take them through the
streets, — how passionately they would cry
out, the tears breaking afresh into the wet
handkerchiefs:
“It’s that Pupasse! It’s that
vilaine
Pupasse!”
To Pupasse herself would be meted out
that
“peine forte et dure,”
that acme of humiliation and disgrace,
so intensely horrible
that many a little girl in that room solemnly
averred and believed she would kill herself
before submitting to it. Pupasse’s voluminous
calico skirt would be gathered up by the
hem and tied up over her head! Oh, the
horrible monstrosity on the stool in the corner
then! There were no eyes in that room that
had any desire to look upon it. And the cries
and the “Quelle injustice!”
that fell on the
ears then from the hidden feelings had all the
weirdness of the unseen, but heard. And all
the other girls in the room, in fear and
trembling, would begin to move their lips in a
perfect whirlwind of study, or write violently
on their slates, or begin at that very instant to
rule off their copy-books for the next day’s
verb.
Pupasse — her name was Marie Pupasse,
but no one thought of calling her anything
but Pupasse, with emphasis on the first syllable
and sibilance on the last — had no parents,
only a grandmother, to describe whom, all
that is necessary to say is that she was as
short as Pupasse was tall, and that her face
resembled nothing so much as a little yellow
apple shriveling from decay. The old lady
came but once a week, to fetch Pupasse fresh
clothes, and a great brown paper bag of nice
things to eat. There was no boarder in the
school who received handsomer bags of cake
and fruit than Pupasse. And although, not
two hours before, a girl might have been
foremost in the shrill cry, “It is Pupasse who
made the noise! It is Pupasse who made me
laugh!” there was nothing in that paper bag
reserved even from such a one. When the
girl herself with native delicacy would, under
the circumstances, judge it discreet to refuse,
Pupasse would plead, “Oh, but take it to
give me pleasure!” And if still the refusal
continued, Pupasse would take her bag and
go into the summer-house in the corner of
the garden, and cry until the unforgiving one
would relent. But the first offering of the
bag was invariably to the stern dispenser of
fools’ caps and the unnamed humiliation of
the reversed skirt: Madame Joubert.
Pupasse was in the fifth class. The sixth
— the abécédaires —
was the lowest in the school. Green was the color of the fifth;
white — innocence — of the
abécédaires.
Exhibition after exhibition, the same green sash
and green ribbons appeared on Pupasse’s
white muslin, the white muslin getting longer
and longer every year, trying to keep up with
her phenomenal growth; and always, from all
over the room, buzzed the audience’s
suppressed merriment at Pupasse’s appearance
in the ranks of the little one of nine and ten.
It was that very merriment that brought
about the greatest change in the Institut St.
Denis. The sitting order of the classes was
reversed. The first class — the graduates —
went up to the top step of the
estrade;
and the little
ones put on the lowest, behind the
pianos. The graduates grumbled that it was
not
comme il faut
to have young ladies of their position stepping
like camels up and
down those great steps; and the little girls
said it was a shame to hide them behind the
pianos after their mamas had taken so much
pains to make them look pretty. But madame
said — going also to natural history for
her comparison — that one must be a rhinoceros
to continue the former routine.
Religion cannot be kept waiting forever on
the intelligence. It was always in the fourth
class that the first communion was made;
that is, when the girls stayed one year in
each class. But Pupasse had spent three
years in the sixth class, and had already been
four in the fifth, and Madame Joubert felt
that longer delay would be disrespectful to
the good Lord. It was true that Pupasse
could not yet distinguish the ten commandments
from the seven capital sins, and still
would answer that Jeanne d’Arc was the
foundress of the “Little Sisters of the Poor.”
But, as Madame Joubert always said in the
little address she made to the catechism class
every year before handing it over to Father
Dolomier, God judged from the heart, and
not from the mind.
Father Dolomier — from his face he would
have been an able contestant of
bonnets d’ âne
with Pupasse, if subjected to Madame Joubert’s
discipline — evidently had the same
method of judging as God, although the
catechism class said they could dance a
waltz on the end of his long nose without
his perceiving it.
There is always a little air of mystery
about the first communion: not that there is
any in reality, but the little ones assume it to
render themselves important. The going to
early mass, the holding their dog-eared
catechisms as if they were relics, the instruction
from the priest, even if he were only old
Father Dolomier — it all put such a little air
of devotion into their faces that it imposed
(as it did every year) upon their companions,
which was a vastly gratifying effect. No
matter how young and innocent she may be,
a woman’s devotion always seems to have
two aims — God and her own sex.
The week of retreat came. Oh, the week
of retreat! That was the
bonne bouche
of it
all, for themselves and for the others. It was
the same every year. By the time the week
of retreat arrived, interest and mystery had
been frothed to the point of indiscretion; so
that the little girls would stand on tiptoe to
peep through the shutters at the postulants
inside, and even the larger girls, to whom
first communion was a thing of an infantile
past, would condescend to listen to their
reports with ill-feigned indifference.
As the day of the first communion neared,
the day of the general confession naturally
neared too, leading it. And then the little
girls, peeping through the shutters, and holding
their breath to see better, saw what they
beheld every year; but it was always new
and awesome — mysterious scribbling in
corners with lead-pencils on scraps of paper;
consultations; rewritings; copyings; the list
of their sins, of all the sins of their lives.
“Ma chère!”
— pigtails
and sunbonnets
hiving outside would shudder. “Oh,
Mon Dieu!
To have to confess all — but all
your sins! As for me, it would kill me, sure!”
And the frightful recoils of their
consciences would make all instantly blanch and
cross themselves.
“And look at Pupasse’s sins! Oh, but
they are long! Ma chère, but look! But
look, I ask you, at them!”
The longest record was of course the most
complimentary and honorable to the possessor,
as each girl naturally worked not only
for absolution but for fame.
Between catechisms and instructions Madame
Joubert would have
“La Vie des Saints”
read aloud, to
stimulate their piety and
to engage their thoughts; for the thoughts
of first communicants are worse than flies for
buzzing around the forbidden. The lecture
must have been a great quickener of
conscience; for they would dare punishment and
cheat Madame Joubert, under her own eyes,
in order surreptitiously to add a new sin to
their list. Of course the one hour’s recreation
could not afford time enough for observation
now, and the little girls were driven
to all sorts of excuses to get out of the
classroom for one moment’s peep through the
shutters; at which whole swarms of them
would sometimes be caught and sent into
punishment.
Only two days more. Madame Joubert
put them through the rehearsal, a most
important part of the preparation, almost as
important as catechism — how to enter the
church, how to hold the candle, how to
advance, how to kneel, retire — everything, in
fact.
Only one day more, the quietest, most
devotional day of all. Pupasse lost her sins!
Of course every year the same accident
happened to some one. But it was a new
accident to Pupasse. And such a long list!
The commotion inside that retreat! Pupasse’s
nasal whine, carrying her lament
without any mystery to the outside garden.
Such searching of pockets, rummaging of
corners, microscopic examination of the
floor! Such crimination and recrimination,
protestation, asseveration, assurances, backed
by divine and saintly invocations! Pupasse
accused companion after companion of
filching her sins, which each after each would
violently deny, producing each her own list
from her own pocket, — proof to conviction of
innocence, and, we may say, of guilt also.
Pupasse declared they had filched it to
copy, because her list was the longest and
most complete. She could not go to confession
without her sins; she could not go to
communion without confession. The tears
rolled down her long thin nose unchecked,
for she never could remember to use her
handkerchief until reminded by Madame Joubert.
She had committed it to memory, as all the
others had done theirs; but how was she to
know without the list if she had not forgotten
something? And to forget one thing in a general
confession they knew was a mortal sin.
“I shall tell Madame Joubert! I shall tell
Madame Joubert!”
”Ma
chère!” whispered the little ones
outside. “Oh, but look at them!
Elles font les quatre cents coups!”
which is equivalent
to “cutting up like the mischief.”
And with reason. As if such an influx
of the world upon them at this moment were
not sufficient of itself to damn them. But to
tell Madame Joubert! With all their dresses
made and ready, wreaths, veils, candles,
prayer-books, picture-cards, mother-of-pearl
prayer-beads, and festival breakfasts with
admiring family and friends prepared. Tell
Madame Joubert! She would simply cancel
it all. In a body they chorused:
“But, Pupasse!”
“Chère
Pupasse!”
“Voyons,
Pupasse!”
“I assure you, Pupasse!”
“On the cross, Pupasse!”
“Ah, Pupasse!”
“We implore you, Pupasse!”
The only response — tears, and “I shall tell
Madame Joubert.”
Consultations, caucuses, individual appeals,
general outbursts. Pupasse stood in the corner.
Curiously, she always sought refuge in
the very sanctum of punishment, her face
hidden in her bended arms, her hoops standing
out behind, vouchsafing nothing but tears,
and the promise to tell Madame Joubert.
And three o’clock approaching! And Madame
Joubert imminent! But Pupasse really
could not go to confession without her sins.
They all recognized that; they were reasonable,
as they assured her.
A crisis quickens the wits. They heard the
cathedral clock strike the quarter to three.
They whispered, suggested, argued — bunched
in the farthest corner from Pupasse.
“Console yourself, Pupasse! We will help
you, Pupasse! Say no more about it! We
will help you!”
A delegate was sent to say that. She was
only four feet and a half high, and had to
stand on tiptoe to pluck the six-foot Pupasse’s
dress to gain her attention.
And they did help her generously. A new
sheet of fool’s-cap was procured, and torn in
two, lengthwise, and pinned in a long strip.
One by one, each little girl took it, and,
retiring as far as possible, would put her
hand into her pocket, and, extracting her list,
would copy it in full on the new paper. Then
she would fold it down, and give it to the
next one, until all had written.
“Here, Pupasse; here are all our sins.
We give them to you; you can have them.”
Pupasse was radiant; she was more than
delighted, and the more she read the better
pleased she was. Such a handsome long list,
and so many sins she had never thought of —
never dreamed of! She set herself with zeal
to commit them to memory. But a hand on
the door — Madame Joubert! You never
could have told that those little girls had not
been sitting during the whole time, with their
hands clasped and eyes cast up to the ceiling,
or moving their lips as the prayer-beads
glided through their fingers. Their versatility
was really marvelous.
Poor Pupasse! God solved the dilemma
of her education, and madame’s increasing
sensitiveness about her appearance in the
fifth class, by the death of the old grandmother.
She went home to the funeral, and
never returned — or at least she returned, but
only for madame. There was a little scene
in the parlor: Pupasse, all dressed in black,
with her bag of primary books in her hand,
ready and eager to get back to her classes
and fools’ caps; madame, hesitating between
her interests and her fear of ridicule; Madame
Joubert, between her loyalty to school and
her conscience. Pupasse the only one free
and untrammeled, simple and direct.
That little school parlor had been the stage
for so many scenes! Madame Joubert detested
acting — the comedy, as she called it.
There was nothing she punished with more
pleasure up in her room. And yet —
“Pupasse, ma
fille, give me your grammar.”
The old battered, primitive book was gotten
out of the bag, the string still tied between
the leaves for convenience in hanging around
the neck.
“Your last punishment: the rule for
irregular verbs. Commence!”
“I know it, Madame Joubert; I know it
perfectly, I assure you.”
“Commence!”
“Irregular verbs — but I assure you I
know it — I know it by heart — ”
“Commence, ma
fille!”
“Irregular verbs — irregular verbs — I know
it, Madame Joubert — one moment — ” and
she shook her right hand, as girls do to get
inspiration, they say. “Irregular verbs —
give me one word, Madame Joubert; only
one word!”
“That — ”
“Irregular verbs, that — irregular verbs,
that — ”
“See here, Pupasse; you do not know that
lesson any more than a cat does” — Madame
Joubert’s favorite comparison.
“Yes, I do, Madame Joubert! Yes, I do!”
“Silence!”
“But, Madame Joubert — ”
“Will you be silent!”
“Yes, Madame Joubert; only — ”
“Pupasse, one more word — and — ” Madame
Joubert was forgetting her comedy —
“Listen, Pupasse, and obey! You go home
and learn that lesson. When you know it,
you can reënter your class. That is the
punishment I have thought of to correct
your ‘want of attention.’”
That was the way Madame Joubert put
it — “want of attention.”
Pupasse looked at her — at madame, a
silent but potent spectator. To be sent from
home because she did not know the rule of
the irregular verbs! To be sent from home,
family, friends! — for that was the way
Pupasse put it. She had been in that school —
it may only be whispered — fifteen years.
Madame Joubert knew it; so did madame,
although they accounted for only four or five
years in each class. That school was her
home; Madame Joubert — God help her! —
her mother; madame, her divinity; fools’
caps and turned-up skirts, her life. The old
grandmother — she it was who had done
everything for her (a
ci-devant
rag-picker,
they say); she it was who was nothing to
her.
Madame must have felt something of it
besides the loss of the handsome salary for
years from the little old withered woman.
But conventionality is inexorable; and the
St. Denis’s great recommendation was its
conventionality. Madame Joubert must have
felt something of it, — she must have felt
something of it, — for why should she
volunteer? Certainly madame could not have
imposed that upon
her. It must have been an
inspiration of the moment, or a movement,
a
tressaillement, of the heart.
“Listen, Pupasse, my child. Go home,
study your lesson well. I shall come every
evening myself and hear it; and as soon as
you know it, I shall fetch you back myself.
You know I always keep my word.”
Keep her word! That she did. Could the
inanimate past testify, what a fluttering of
fools’ caps in that parlor — “Daily Bees,” and
“Weekly Couriers,” by the year-full!
What could Pupasse say or do? It settled
the question, as Madame Joubert assured
madame, when the tall, thin black figure with
the bag of books disappeared through the
gate.
Madame Joubert was never known to
break her word; that is all one knows about
her part of the bargain.
One day, not three years ago, ringing a
bell to inquire for a servant, a familiar
murmuring fell upon the ear, and an old
abécédaire’s
eyes could not resist the temptation
to look through the shutters. There sat
Pupasse; there was her old grammar; there
were both fingers stopping her ears — as all
studious girls do, or used to do; and there
sounded the old words composing the rule for
irregular verbs.
And you all remember how long it is since
we wore funnel-shaped hoop-skirts!
Notes
-
Neck-foulard.
Scarf.
-
Je
ne sais quoi de dégagé.
Offhand, I know not what.
-
Bon ton. The fashionable.
-
Pain de Paris. Paris bread. The
recipe is very close to the French bread currently sold
in New Orleans.
-
Escritoire. A secretary desk.
-
“Au de ça du déluge”.
Before the flood.
-
Roturier. Commoner.
-
Certes! Certainly!
-
Farceur. Jester.
-
Sine qua non. Without
which not. (Latin).
-
En fait d’ornements. Made ornaments.
-
Modistes. Dressmakers.
-
Chemises de nuit. Nightdresses.
-
La grande demoiselle. The great lady.
-
Preux chevaliers.
Valiant knights.
-
célibataire. Single, celibate.
-
Nouveaux pauvres. New poor.
-
Comme il faut.
Properly.
-
Mignonne.
Cute.
-
Brun.
Brunette.
-
La bonne aventure is
or was generally a very much battered
foolscap copy-book, which contained a list of all
possible elements
of future (school-girl) happiness. Each item
answered a question,
and had a number affixed to it. To draw one’s
fortune consisted in
asking question after question, and guessing a
number, a companion
volunteering to read the answers. To avoid
cheating, the books
were revised from time to time, and the
numbers changed. — Author’s note.
-
Brun, riche, avenant.
Brunette, rich, a horse-rider.
-
Il m’aime, un peu, beaucoup, passionément, pas du
tout. He loves me, a little, a lot, passionately, not at
all.
-
Enfin. Finally.
-
Ennuyée. Bored.
-
Orgueil. Pride, vanity.
-
Peignoirs. Bathrobe.
-
Ma foi! My faith!
-
Métier d’Adorine. Business of Adorine.
-
Banquette. Sidewalk.
-
Coton-Maï is
an innocent oath invented by the good, pious priest
as a substitute for one more harmful. — King’s note.
-
Bandeaux. Headbands.
-
Coiffeur. Hairdresser.
-
Dugazon. Dugazon was the stage name of the Gourgaud family, a famous French acting family in the 1700s.
-
Manquée. Failed.
-
“Quelle ivresse!” or “Quelle
horreur!”
“How drunk!” or “How
horrible!”
-
“Ut de poitrine.”
C note sung from the chest.
-
Chef d’ orchestre.
Conductor.
-
Grillade.
Grilled food.
-
Animalculæ. Small animals. (Latin).
-
“Pourquoi ces larmes?”
Why the tears?
-
Ad libitum. At liberty. More commonly written as ad lib
today. (Latin).
-
Chasséeing.
Chasing.
-
Personalia.
Personal belongings. (Latin).
-
Haute nouveauté.
Innovation.
-
Comme il faut.
Proper.
-
Nouveaux riches and parvenus.
New rich and social climbers.
-
Avant scène.
Forefront.
-
Mauvaise honte.
Bashfulness.
-
Hein?
Huh?
-
“Mesdemoiselles; à vos places!
Notre Père
qui est dans le ciel — Qui a fait ce bruit?”
“Young ladies; to your seats! Our Father in Heaven — Who made that noise?”
-
“Bee.” The
New
Orleans Bee/ L’Abeille
de la Nouvelle-Orléans was a major French-language newspaper
in New Orleans that ran from 1827 until 1923.
-
Quelle injustice! What injustice!
-
Bonnet d’ âne. Dunce’s
cap. (lit., asshat).
-
“Eau Quinquina.”
Cinchona water, used to treat malaria. Cinchona is an evergreen
South American shrub. The malaria medicine quinine is extracted from
its bark.
-
“Courrier des Etats-Unis.”
The United States Mail. A French-language newspaper founded by Napoleon
Bonaparte’s older brother Joseph in 1828.
-
“Abécédaires.”
ABC-books. Also called a primer. They were usually made of wood,
often with handles on them.
-
Bonnes.
Maids.
-
“Peine forte et dure.”
Punishment harsh and dire.
-
Estrade.
Platform.
-
Comme il faut.
Proper.
-
Bonne bouche.
Good word.
-
“Ma chère!”
Good word.
-
“La Vie des Saints.”
The Lives of the Saints.
-
Ci-devant.
Heretofore.
Text prepared by
- Jacob Cobb
- Joseph Edwards
- Payton LaPietra
- Bruce R. Magee
Source
King, Grace. Balcony Stories. New York: Century, 1893. Internet Archive. 19 May 2006. Web. 8 Feb. 2015.
<https:// archive. org/ details/ balcony stories00 kingrich>.
Louisiana
Anthology