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Thomas Clarkson - "The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808), Vol. I"

Cassius Dio - "Dio's Rome"

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O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 by Various

V >> Various >> O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921




His choice, therefore, was in itself a loss of control and a dangerous
one, for nothing is more perilous to sanity than the certainty that
most other people in the world are wrong. Such conviction leads to a
Jesuitical contempt of means; in cases where the Puritan shell has
grown to be impregnable from the outside it sets up an internal
ferment which sometimes bursts shell and man and all into disastrous
fragments. Until old age kills them, the passions and emotions never
die in man; suppress them how we will, we can never ignore them; they
rise again to mock us when we think we are done with them forever. And
the man of Simpson's type suffers from them most of all, for he dams
against them all normal channels of expression.

Simpson, standing at the pier-end, was suffering from them now. His
exaltation--a thing of a moment, as his fervour had been--had gone out
of him, leaving him limp, uncertain of his own powers, of his own
calling, even--the prey to the discouragement that precedes action,
which is the deepest discouragement of all. Except for himself and
Witherbee the pier was deserted; behind him the filthy town slept in
its filth. Four buzzards wheeled above it, gorged and slow; the
harbour lay before him like a green mirror, so still that the ship was
reflected in it down to the last rope-yarn. Over all, the sun,
colourless and furnace-hot, burned in a sky of steel. There was
insolence in the scorched slopes that shouldered up from the bay, a
threatening permanence in the saw-edged sky-line. The indifference of
it all, its rock-ribbed impenetrability to human influence, laid a
crushing weight on Simpson's soul, so that he almost sank to his knees
in sheer oppression of spirit.

"Do you know much about Hayti?" asked Witherbee, coming up behind him.

"As much as I could learn from books." Simpson wanted to be angry at
the consul--why he could not tell--but Witherbee's voice was so
carefully courteous that he yielded perforce to its persuasion and
swung around, facing him. Suddenly, because he was measuring himself
against man and not against Nature, his weakness left him, and
confidence in himself and his mission flooded back upon him. "As much
as I could get from books." He paused. "You have lived here long?"

"Long enough," Witherbee answered. "Five years."

"You know the natives, then?"

"Can't help knowing them. There are quite a lot of them, you see, and
there's almost no one else. Do you know negroes at all?"

"Very little."

"You'd better study them a bit before you--before you do anything you
have it in mind to do--the Haytian negro in particular. They're not
like white men, you know."

"Like children, you mean?"

"Like some children. I'd hate to have them for nephews and nieces."

"Why?"

"We-ell"--Witherbee, looking sidelong at Simpson, bit off the end of a
cigar--"a number of reasons. They're superstitious, treacherous,
savage, cruel, and--worst of all--emotional. They've gone back.
They've been going back for a hundred years. The West Coast--I've been
there--is not so bad as Hayti. It's never been anything else than what
it is now, you see, and if it moves at all it must move forward.
There's nothing awful about savagery when people have never known
anything else. Hayti has. You know what the island used to be before
Desalines."

"I've read. But just what do you mean by West Coast savagery--here?"

"Snake-worship. Voodoo." Witherbee lit the cigar "Human sacrifice."

"And the Roman Church does nothing!" There was exultation in Simpson's
voice. His distrust of the Roman Church had been aggravated by his
encounter with the black priest that morning.

"The Roman Church does what it can. It's been unfortunate in its
instruments. Especially unfortunate now."

"Father Antoine?"

"Father Antoine. You met him?"

"This morning. A brute, and nothing more."

"Just that." Witherbee let a mouthful of smoke drift into the
motionless air. "It's curious," he said.

"What is?"

"Father Antoine will make it unpleasant for you. He may try to have
you knifed, or something."

"Impossible!"

"Not at all. Human life is worth nothing here. No wonder--it's not
really worth living. But you're safe enough, and that's the curious
thing."

"Why am I safe?"

"Because your landlady is who she is." Witherbee glanced over his
shoulder, and, although they were the only people on the pier, from
force of habit he dropped his voice. "The _mamaloi_ has more power
than the Church." He straightened and looked out toward the ship.
"Here's her idiot with your trunk. My office is the first house on the
left after you leave the pier. Don't forget that."

He turned quickly and was gone before the cripple's boat had reached
the landing.


III

The town, just stirring out of its siesta as Simpson followed the
cripple through the streets, somehow reassured him. Men like Bunsen
and Witherbee, who smiled at his opinions and remained cold to his
rhapsodies, always oppressed him with a sense of ineffectuality. He
knew them of old--knew them superficially, of course, for, since he
was incapable of talking impersonally about religion, he had never had
the chance to listen to the cool and yet often strangely mystical
opinions which such men hold about it. He knew, in a dim sort of way,
that men not clergymen sometimes speculated about religious matters,
seeking light from each other in long, fragmentary conversations. He
knew that much, and disapproved of it--almost resented it. It seemed
to him wrong to discuss God without becoming angry, and very wrong for
laymen to discuss God at all. When circumstances trapped him into talk
with them about things divine, he felt baffled by their silences and
their reserves, seemed to himself to be scrabbling for entrance to
their souls through some sort of a slippery, impenetrable casing; he
never tried to enter through their minds, where the door stood always
open. The trouble was that he wanted to teach and be listened to;
wherefore he was subtly more at home among the ignorant and in such
streets as he was now traversing than with educated men. He had been
born a few decades too late; here in Hayti he had stepped back a
century or so into the age of credulity. Credulity, he believed, was a
good thing, almost a divine thing, if it were properly used; he did
not carry his processes far enough to realize that credulity could
never become fixed--that it was always open to conviction. A receptive
and not an inquiring mind seemed to him the prerequisite for a
convert. And black people, he had heard, were peculiarly receptive.

The question was, then, where and how to start his work. Hayti
differed from most mission fields, for, so far as he knew, no one had
ever worked in it before him. The first step was to cultivate the
intimacy of the people, and that he found difficult in the extreme. He
had one obvious channel of approach to them; when buying necessary
things for his room, he could enter into conversation with the
shopkeepers and the market-women, but this he found it difficult to
do. They did not want to talk to him, even seemed reluctant to sell
him anything; and when he left their shops or stalls, did not answer
his "Au revoir." He wondered how much the priest had to do with their
attitude. They had little also that he wanted--he shopped for a week
before he found a gaudy pitcher and basin and a strip of matting for
his floor. Chairs, bureaus, bookcases, and tables did not exist. He
said as much to Madame Picard, and gathered from her growled response
that he must find a carpenter. The cripple, his constant companion in
his first days on the island, took him to one--a gray old negro who
wore on a shoe-string about his neck a pouch which Simpson thought at
first to be a scapular, and whom age and his profession had made
approachable. He was garrulous even; he ceased working when at length
he understood what Simpson wanted, sat in his doorway with his head in
the sun and his feet in the shade, and lit a pipe made out of a tiny
cocoanut. Yes--he could build chairs, tables, anything m'sieu' wanted
There was wood also--black palm for drawer-knobs and cedar and
mahogany and rosewood, but especially mahogany. An excellent wood,
pleasant to work in and suave to the touch. Did they use it in the
United States, he wondered?

"A great deal," answered Simpson. "And the San Domingo wood is the
best, I believe."

"San Domingo--but yes," the carpenter said; "the Haytian also--that is
excellent. Look!"

He led Simpson to the yard at the rear of his house and showed him
half a dozen boards, their grain showing where the broad axe had hewed
them smooth. Was it not a beautiful wood? And what furniture did
m'sieu' desire?

Simpson had some little skill with his pencil--a real love for drawing
was one of the instincts which his austere obsessions had crushed out
of him. He revolved several styles in his mind, decided at length on
the simplest, and drew his designs on a ragged scrap of wrapping
paper, while the carpenter, leaning down from his chair by the door,
watched him, smoking, and now and then fingering the leather pouch
about his neck. Simpson, looking up occasionally to see that his
sketch was understood, could not keep his eyes away from the
pouch--whatever it was, it was not a scapular. He did not ask about
it, though he wanted to; curiosity, he had heard, should be repressed
when one is dealing with barbarians. But he knew that that was not his
real reason for not asking.

"But it is easy," said the carpenter, picking up the paper and
examining it. "And the seats of the chairs shall be of white hide, is
it not?"

Simpson assented. He did not leave the shop at once, but remained
seated on the threshold, following his usual policy of picking up
acquaintances where he could.

"M'sieu' is a priest?" the old man asked, squinting at he filled the
cocoanut pipe again and thrust it between his ragged yellow teeth.

"Not a priest. A minister of the gospel."

"_Quoi_?" said the carpenter.

Simpson saw that he must explain. It was difficult. He had on the one
hand to avoid suggesting that the Roman Church was insufficient--that
denunciation he intended to arrive at when he had gained firmer ground
with the people--and on the other to refrain from hinting that Haytian
civilization stood in crying need of uplift. That also could come
later. He wallowed a little in his explanation, and then put the whole
matter on a personal basis.

"I think I have a message--something new to say to you about Christ.
But I have been here a week now and have found none to listen to me."

"Something new?" the carpenter rejoined. "But that is easy if it is
something new. In Hayti we like new things."

"No one will listen to me," Simpson repeated.

The carpenter reflected for a moment, or seemed to be doing so.

"Many men come here about sunset," he said. "We sit and drink a little
rum before dark; it is good against the fever."

"I will come also," said Simpson, rising. "It is every evening?"

"Every evening." The carpenter's right hand rose to the pouch which
was not a scapular and he caressed it.

"Au revoir," said Simpson suddenly.

"'_Voir_," the carpenter replied, still immobile in his chair by the
door.

Up to now a walk through the streets had been a night-mare to Simpson,
for the squalor of them excited to protest every New England nerve in
his body, and the evident hostility of the people constantly
threatened his success with them. He had felt very small and lonely,
like a man who has undertaken to combat a natural force; he did not
like to feel small and lonely, and he did not want to believe in
natural forces. Chosen vessel as he believed himself to be, thus far
the island had successfully defied him, and he had feared more than
once that it would do so to the end. He had compelled himself to
frequent the markets, hoping always that he would find in them the key
to the door that was closed against him; he had not found it, and,
although he recognized that three weeks was but a fractional moment of
eternity, and comforted himself by quoting things about the "mills of
God," he could not approach satisfaction with what he had accomplished
so far.

His interview with the carpenter had changed all that, and on his way
home he trod the Grand Rue more lightly than he had ever done. Even
the cathedral, even the company of half-starved conscripts that
straggled past him in the tail of three generals, dismayed him no
longer, for the cathedral was but the symbol of a frozen Christianity
which he need no longer fear, and the conscripts were his
people--his--or soon would be. All that he had wanted was a start; he
had it now, though he deplored the rum which would be drunk at his
first meeting with the natives. One must begin where one could.

Witherbee, sitting in the window of the consulate, called twice before
Simpson heard him.

"You look pretty cheerful," he said. "Things going well?"

"They've just begun to, I think--I think I've found the way to reach
these people."

"Ah?" The monosyllable was incredulous though polite. "How's that?"

"I've just been ordering some furniture from a carpenter," Simpson
answered. It was the first time since the day of his arrival that he
had seen Witherbee to speak to, and he found it a relief to speak in
his own language and without calculating the result of his words.

"A carpenter? Vieux Michaud, I suppose?"

"That's his name. You know him?"

"Very well." The consul tipped back his chair and tapped his lips with
a pencil. "Very well. He's a clever workman. He'll follow any design
you give him, and the woods, of course, are excellent."

"Yes. He showed me some. But he's more than a carpenter to me. He's
more--receptive--than most of the natives, and it seems that his shop
is a gathering place--a centre. He asked me to come in the evenings."

"And drink rum?" Witherbee could not resist that.

"Ye-es. He said they drank rum. I sha'n't do that, of course, but one
must begin where one can."

"I suppose so," Witherbee answered slowly. The office was darkened to
just above reading-light, and the consul's face was in the shadow.
Evidently he had more to say, but he allowed a long silence to
intervene before he went on. Simpson, imaging wholesale conversions,
sat quietly; he was hardly aware of his surroundings.

"Don't misunderstand what I'm going to say," the consul began at
length. Simpson straightened, on his guard at once. "It may be of use
to you--in your work," he added quickly. "It's this. Somehow--by
chance perhaps, though I don't think so--you've fallen into strange
company--stranger than any white man I've ever known."

"I am not afraid of voodoo," said Simpson rather scornfully.

"It would be better if you were a little afraid of it. I am--and I
know what I'm talking about. Look what's happened to you. There's the
Picard woman--she's the one who had President Simon Sam under her
thumb. Did you know he carried the symbols of voodoo next his heart?
And now Michaud, who's her right hand and has been for years. Looks
like deep water to me."

"I must not fear for my own body."

"That's not what I mean exactly, though I wish you were a little more
afraid for it. It might save me trouble--possibly save our government
trouble--in the end. But the consequences of letting voodoo acquire
any more power than it has may be far-reaching."

"I am not here to give it more power." Simpson, thoroughly angry, rose
to go. "It is my business to defeat it--to root it out."

"Godspeed to you in that"--Witherbee's voice was ironical. "But
remember what I tell you. The Picard woman is subtle, and Michaud is
subtle." Simpson had crossed the threshold, and only half heard the
consul's next remark. "Voodoo is more subtle than both of them
together. Look out for it."

Witherbee's warning did no more than make Simpson angry; he attributed
it to wrong motives--to jealousy perhaps to hostility certainly, and
neither jealousy nor hostility could speak true words. In spite of all
that he had heard he could not believe that voodoo was so powerful in
the island; this was the twentieth century, he insisted, and the most
enlightened country in the world was less than fifteen hundred miles
away; he forgot that opinions and not figures number the centuries,
and refused to see that distance had nothing to do with the case.
These were a people groping through the dark; when they saw the light
they could not help but welcome it, he thought. The idea that they
preferred their own way of life and their own religion, that they
would not embrace civilization till they were forced to do so at the
point of benevolent bayonets, never entered his head. His own way of
life was so obviously superior. He resolved to have nothing more to do
with Witherbee.

When he returned to the carpenter's house at about six that evening he
entered the council of elders that he found there with the
determination to place himself on an equality with them. It was to his
credit that he accomplished this feat, but it was not surprising for
the humility of his mind at least was genuine. He joined in their
conversation, somewhat stiffly at first, but perhaps no more so than
became a stranger. Presently, because he saw that he could not refuse
without offending his host, he conquered prejudice and took a little
rum and sugar and water. It went to his head without his knowing it,
as rum has a habit of doing; he became cheerfully familiar with the
old men and made long strides into their friendship--or thought he
did. He did not once mention religion to them at that first meeting,
though he had to exercise considerable self-restraint to prevent
himself from doing so.

On his way home he met Father Antoine not far from Michaud's door. The
priest would have passed with his usual surly look if Simpson had not
stopped him.

"Well?" Antoine demanded.

"Why should we quarrel--you and I?" Simpson asked. "Can we not work
together for these people of yours?"

"Your friends are not my people, heretic!" Father Antoine retorted."
Rot in hell with them!"

He plunged past Simpson and was gone down the darkling alley.

"You are late, m'sieu'," remarked Madame Picard as he came into the
kitchen and sat down in a chair near the cripple. Her manner was less
rough than usual.

"I've been at Michaud's," he answered.

"Ah? But you were there this morning."

"He asked me to come this evening, when his friends came, madame.
There were several there."

"They are often there," she answered. There was nothing significant in
her tone, but Simpson had an uneasy feeling that she had known all the
time of his visit to the carpenter.

"I met Father Antoine on the way home," he said.

"A bad man!" She flamed into sudden violence. "A bad man!"

"I had thought so." Her loquacity this evening was amazing. Simpson
thought he saw an opening to her confidence and plunged in. "And he is
a priest. It is bad, that. Here are sheep without a shepherd."

"_Quoi_?"

"Here are many people--all good Christians." Simpson, eager and
hopeful, leaned forward in his chair. His gaunt face with the
down-drawn mouth and the hungry eyes--grown more hungry in the last
three weeks--glowed, took on fervour; his hand shot out expressive
fingers. The woman raised her head slowly, staring at him; more slowly
still she seated herself at the table that stood between them. She
rested her arms on it, and narrowed her eyelids as he spoke till her
eyes glittered through the slits of them.

"All good Christians," Simpson went on; "and there is none to lead
them save a black----" He slurred the word just in time. The woman's
eyes flashed open and narrowed again. "Save a renegade priest,"
Simpson concluded. "It is wrong, is it not? And I knew it was wrong,
though I live far away and came--was led--here to you." His voice,
though it had not been loud, left the room echoing. "It was a real
call." He whispered that.

"You are a Catholic?" asked Madame Picard.

"Yes. Of the English Catholic Church." He suspected that the
qualifying adjective meant nothing to her, but let the ambiguity rest.

"I was not sure," she said slowly, "though you told the boy." Her
eyes, velvet-black in the shadow upcast by the lamp, opened slowly.
"There has been much trouble with Father Antoine, and now small
numbers go to mass or confession." Her voice had the effect of
shrillness though it remained low; her hands flew out, grasping the
table-edge at arms' length with an oddly masculine gesture. "He
deserved that! To tell his _canaille_ that I--that we----He dared! But
now--now--we shall see!"

Her voice rasped in a subdued sort of a shriek; she sprang up from her
chair, and stood for the fraction of a second with her hands raised
and her fists clinched. Simpson, puzzled, amazed, and a little scared
at last, had barely time to notice the position before it dissolved.
The child, frightened, screamed from the floor.

"_Taisez-vous--taisez-vous, mon enfant. Le temps vient_."

She was silent for a long time after that. Simpson sat wondering what
she would do next, aware of an uncanny fascination that emanated from
her. It seemed to him as though there were subterranean fires in the
ground that he walked on.

"You shall teach us," she said in her usual monotone. "You shall teach
us--preach to many people. No house will hold them all." She leaned
down and caressed the child. "_Le temps vient, mon petit. Le temps
vient_."

Under Simpson's sudden horror quivered an eerie thrill. He mistook it
for joy at the promised fulfilment of his dreams. He stepped to his
own doorway and hesitated there with his hand on the latch.

"To many people? Some time, I hope."

"Soon." She looked up from the child; there was a snakiness in the
angle of her head and neck. "Soon."

He opened the door, slammed it behind him, and dropped on tense knees
beside his bed. In the kitchen the cripple laughed--laughed for a long
time. Simpson's tightly pressed palms could not keep the sound from
his ears.


IV

Each night the gathering at Vieux Michaud's became larger; it grew too
large for the house, and presently overflowed into the yard behind,
where Michaud kept his lumber. Generally thirty or forty natives
collected between six and seven in the evening, roosting on the piled
boards or sitting on the dusty ground in little groups, their
cigarettes puncturing the blue darkness that clung close to the earth
under the young moon. There were few women among them at first and
fewer young men; Simpson, who knew that youth ought to be more
hospitable to new ideas than age, thought this a little strange and
spoke to Michaud about it.

"But they are my friends, m'sieu'," answered Michaud.

The statement might have been true of the smaller group that Simpson
had first encountered at the carpenter's house; it was not true of the
additions to it, for he was evidently not on intimate terms with them.
Nor did he supply rum for all of them; many brought their own. That
was odd also, if Simpson had only known it; the many _cantinas_
offered attractions which the carpenter's house did not. That fact
occurred to him at length.

"They have heard of you, m'sieu'--and that you have something new to
say to them. We Haytians like new things."

Thus, very quietly, almost as though it had been a natural growth of
interest, did Simpson's ministry begin. He stepped one evening to the
platform that overhung the carpenter's backyard, and began to talk.
Long study had placed the missionary method at his utter command, and
he began with parables and simple tales which they heard eagerly.
Purposely, he eschewed anything striking or startling in this his
first sermon. It was an attempt to establish a sympathetic
understanding between himself and his audience, and not altogether an
unsuccessful one, for his motives were still unmixed. He felt that he
had started well; when he was through speaking small groups gathered
around him as children might have done, and told him inconsequent,
wandering tales of their own--tales which were rather fables, folklore
transplanted from another hemisphere and strangely crossed with
Christianity. He was happy; if it had not been that most of them wore
about their necks the leather pouches that were not scapulars he would
have been happier than any man has a right to be. One of these
pouches, showing through the ragged shirt of an old man with thin lips
and a squint, was ripped at the edge, and the unmistakable sheen of a
snake's scale glistened in the seam. Simpson could not keep his eyes
from it.

He dared to be more formal after that, and on the next night preached
from a text--the Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us." That sermon
also was effective: toward the end of it two or three women were
weeping a little, and the sight of their tears warmed him with the
sense of power. In that warmth certain of his prejudices and
inhibitions began to melt away; the display of feelings and
sensibilities could not be wicked or even undesirable if it prepared
the way for the gospel by softening the heart. He began to dabble in
emotion himself, and that was a dangerous matter, for he knew nothing
whatever about it save that, if he felt strongly, he could arouse
strong feeling in others. Day by day he unwittingly became less sure
of the moral beauty of restraint, and ardours which he had never
dreamed of began to flame free of his soul.