Balcony Stories Part 5

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 pa.s.sing 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, pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.surances, 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 s.p.a.ce 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, advertis.e.m.e.nts, 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 ap.r.o.n.

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. G.o.d, she said, had let her drop, just as her mother had done. More than ever she grieved, as she crept down the street, that she had never mounted the auctioneer's block. An ownerless free negro! She knew no one whose duty it was to help her; no one knew her to help her. In the whole world (it was all she had asked) there was no white child to call her mammy, no white lackey or gentleman (it was the extent of her dreams) beholden to her as to a nurse. And all her innumerable black beneficiaries! Even the janitor, whom she had tended as the others, had deserted her like his white prototype.

She tried to find a place for herself, but she had no indorsers, no recommenders. She dared not mention the name of the negro-trader; it banished her not only from the households of the whites, but from those of the genteel of her own color. And everywhere soldiers sentineled the streets--soldiers whose tone and accent reminded her of the negro-trader.

Her sufferings, whether imaginary or real, were sufficiently acute to drive her into the only form of escape which once had been possible to friendless negroes. She became a runaway. With a bundle tied to the end of a stick over her shoulder, just as the old prints represent it, she fled from her homelessness and loneliness, from her ign.o.ble 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 G.o.d left them after Sheridan pa.s.sed through; and the richer ones say very much the same thing--

But one should hear her tell it herself, as has been said, on a cold, gloomy winter day in the country, the fire glimmering on the hearth; the overworked husband in the fields; the baby quiet at last; the mother uneasy, restless, thought-driven; the soft black hand rubbing backward and forward, rubbing out aches and frets and nervousness.

The eyelids droop; the firelight plays fantasies on the bed-curtains; the ear drops words, sentences; one gets confused--one sleeps--one dreams.

"ONE OF US"

At the first glance one might have been inclined to doubt; but at the second anybody would have recognized her--that is, with a little mental rehabilitation: the bright little rouge spots in the hollow of her cheek, the eyebrows well accentuated with paint, the thin lips rose-tinted, and the dull, straight hair frizzed and curled and twisted and turned by that consummate rascal and artist, the official beautifier and rectifier of stage humanity, Robert, the opera _coiffeur_. Who in the world knows better than he the gulf between the real and the ideal, the limitations between the natural and the romantic?

Yes, one could see her, in that time-honored thin silk dress of hers stiffened into brocade by buckram underneath; the high, low-necked waist, hiding any evidences of breast, if there were such evidences to hide, and bringing the long neck into such faulty prominence; and the sleeves, crisp puffs of tulle divided by bands of red velvet, through which the poor lean arm runs like a wire, stringing them together like beads. Yes, it was she, the whilom _dugazon_ of the opera troupe.

Not that she ever was a _dugazon_, but that was what her voice once aspired to be: a _dugazon manquee_ 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 role 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 plat.i.tudes and inanities the librettist and Heaven connive to put upon the tongues of confidantes and attendants?

[Ill.u.s.tration: "TO POSE IN ABJECT PATIENCE AND AWKWARDNESS."]

Looking at her--how it came over one! The music, the lights, the scene; the fat soprano confiding to her the fact of the "amour extreme" she bears for the tenor, to which she, the _dugazon_, does not even try to listen; her eyes wandering listlessly over the audience. The calorous secret out, and in her possession, how she stumbles over her train to the back of the stage, there to pose in abject patience and awkwardness, while the gallant baritone, touching his sword, and flinging his cape over his shoulder, defies the world and the tenor, who is just recovering from his "ut de poitrine" behind the scenes.

She was talking to me all the time, apologizing for the intrusion, explaining her mission, which involved a short story of her life, as women's intrusions and missions usually do. But my thoughts, also as usual, distracted me from listening, as so often they have distracted me from following what was perhaps more profitable.

The composer, of course, wastes no music upon her; flinging to her only an occasional recitative in two notes, but always ending in a reef of a scale, trill, or roulade, for her to wreck her voice on before the audience. The _chef d'orchestre_, if he is charitable, starts her off with a contribution from his own l.u.s.ty lungs, and then she--oh, her voice is always thinner and more osseous than her arms, and her smile no more graceful than her train!

As well think of the simulated trees, water-falls, and chateaux leaving the stage, as the _dugazon_! One always imagines them singing on into dimness, dustiness, unsteadiness, and uselessness, until, like any other piece of stage property, they are at last put aside and simply left there at the end of some season--there seems to be a superst.i.tion 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 role, 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 pa.s.s Allhallowe'en there, the spirit of those bones might be seen availing itself of the privilege of unasperged corpses to roam. Not singing, not talking--it is an anachronism to say that ghosts talk: their medium of communication must be pure thought; and one should be able to see their thoughts working, just as one sees the working of the digestive organs in the clear viscera of transparent animalcule. The hard thing of it is that ghosts are chained to the same scenes that chained their bodies, and when they sleep-walk, so to speak, it must be through phases of former existence. What a nightmare for them to go over once again the lived and done, the suffered and finished! What a comfort to wake up and find one's self dead, well dead!

I could have continued and put the whole opera troupe in "costume de ghost," but I think it was the woman's eyes that drew me back to her face and her story. She had a sensible face, now that I observed her naturally, as it were; and her hands,--how I have agonized over those hands on the stage!--all knuckles and exaggerated veins, clutching her dress as she sang, or, petrified, outstretched to _Leonore's_ "Pourquoi ces larmes?"--her hands were the hands of an honest, hard-working woman who buckrams her own skirts, and at need could scrub her own floor. Her face (my description following my wandering glance)--her face was careworn, almost to desuetude; not dissipation-worn, as, alas! the faces of the more gifted ladies of opera troupes too often are. There was no fattening in it of pastry, truffles, and bonbons; upon it none of the tracery left by nightly champagne tides and ripples; and consequently her figure, under her plain dress, had not that for display which the world has conventioned to call charms.

Where a window-cord would hardly have sufficed to girdle _Leonore_, a necklace would have served her. She had not beauty enough to fear the flattering dangers of masculine snares and temptations,--or there may have been other reasons,--but as a wife--there was something about her that guaranteed it--she would have blossomed love and children as a fig-tree does figs.

In truth, she was just talking about children. The first part of her story had pa.s.sed: 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 role," she said first) "in any of your asylums, in any of your charitable inst.i.tutions, for me?

I would ask nothing but my clothes and food, and very little of that; the recompense would be the children--the little girl children," with a smile--can you imagine the smile of a woman dreaming of children that might be? "Think! Never to have held a child in my arms more than a moment, never to have felt a child's arms about my neck! Never to have known a child! Born on a stage, my mother born on a stage!" Ah, there were tragic possibilities in that voice and movement! "Pardon, madam. You see how I repeat. And you must be very wearied hearing about me. But I could be their nurse and their servant. I would bathe and dress them, play with them, teach them their prayers; and when they are sick they would see no difference. They would not know but what their mother was there!"

Oh, she had her program all prepared; one could see that.

"And I would sing to them--no! no!" with a quick gesture, "nothing from the stage; little songs and lullabys I have picked up traveling around, and," hesitating, "little things I have composed myself--little things that I thought children would like to hear some day." What did she not unconsciously throw into those last words? "I dream of it," she pursued, talking with as little regard to me as on the stage she sang to the prima donna. "Their little arms, their little faces, their little lips! And in an asylum there would be so many of them! When they cried and were in trouble I would take them in my lap, and I would say to them, with all sorts of tenderness--" She had arranged that in her program, too--all the minutiae of what she would say to them in their distress. But women are that way. When once they begin to love, their hearts are magnifying-lenses for them to feel through. "And my heart hungers to commence right here, now, at once! It seems to me I cannot wait. Ah, madam, no more stage, no more opera!" speaking quickly, feverishly. "As I said, it may be your beautiful spring, your flowers, your birds, and your numbers of children. I have always loved that place most where there are most children; and you have more children here than I ever saw anywhere.

Children are so beautiful! It is strange, is it not, when you consider my life and my rearing?"

Her life, her rearing, how interesting they must have been! What a pity I had not listened more attentively!

"They say you have much to do with asylums here."

Evidently, when roles do not exist in life for certain characters, G.o.d 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 G.o.d ever expect to rear children without their mothers!

But the role I craved to create for my friend was far different--some good, honest bourgeois interior, where lips are coa.r.s.e 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 p.r.o.nounced by the letter, always called her the little _convent_ girl. She was the beau-ideal of the little convent girl. She never raised her eyes except when spoken to. Of course she never spoke first, even to the chambermaid, and when she did speak it was in the wee, shy, furtive voice one might imagine a just-budding violet to have; and she walked with such soft, easy, carefully calculated steps that one naturally felt the penalties that must have secured them--penalties dictated by a black code of deportment.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SISTERS BID HER GOOD-BY.]

She was dressed in deep mourning. Her black straw hat was trimmed with stiff new c.r.a.pe, and her stiff new bombazine dress had c.r.a.pe collar and cuffs. She wore her hair in two long plaits fastened around her head tight and fast. Her hair had a strong inclination to curl, but that had been taken out of it as austerely as the noise out of her footfalls. Her hair was as black as her dress; her eyes, when one saw them, seemed blacker than either, on account of the bluishness of the white surrounding the pupil. Her eyelashes were almost as thick as the black veil which the sisters had fastened around her hat with an extra pin the very last thing before leaving. She had a round little face, and a tiny pointed chin; her mouth was slightly protuberant from the teeth, over which she tried to keep her lips well shut, the effort giving them a pathetic little forced expression. Her complexion was sallow, a pale sallow, the complexion of a brunette bleached in darkened rooms. The only color about her was a blue taffeta ribbon from which a large silver medal of the Virgin hung over the place where a breast pin should have been. She was so little, so little, although she was eighteen, as the sisters told the captain; otherwise they would not have permitted her to travel all the way to New Orleans alone.