O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 18

"But--human sacrifice!" he protested. "You spoke of human sacrifice."

"And cannibalism. _La chevre sans cornes_--the goat without horns--that means an unblemished child less than three years old. It's frequently done. They string it up by its heels, cut its throat, and drink the blood. Then they eat it. Regular ceremony--the _mamaloi_ officiates."

"Who officiates?"

"The _mamaloi_--the priestess."

Simpson jerked himself out of his chair and went on deck. Occasionally his imagination worked loose from control and tormented him as it was doing now. There was a grizzly vividness in the drummer's description.

It was well toward morning before Simpson grasped again his usual certainty of purpose and grew able to thank G.o.d that he had been born into a very wicked world. There was much for a missionary to do in Hayti--he saw that before the night grew thin, and was glad.

Between dawn and daylight the land leaped out of the sea, all clear blues and purples, incomparably fresh and incomparably 111 wistful in that one golden hour of the tropic day before the sun has risen very high--the disembodied spirit of an island. It lay, vague as hope at first, in a jewel-tinted sea; the ship steamed toward it as through the mists of creation's third morning, and all good things seemed possible. Thus had Simpson, reared in an unfriendly land, imagined it, for beneath the dour Puritanism that had lapped him in its armour there still stirred the power of wonder and surprise that has so often through the ages changed Puritans to poets. That glimpse of Hayti would remain with him, he thought, yet within the hour he was striving desperately to hold it. For soon the ruffle of the breeze died from off the sea, and it became gray gla.s.s through which the anchor sank almost without a sound and was lost.

"Sweet place, isn't it, Mr. Simpson?" said Bunsen, the purser, pausing on his way to the gangway.

"So that," Simpson rejoined slowly--and because it was a port of his desire his voice shook on the words--"is Port au Prince!"

"That," Bunsen spat into the sea, "is Port au Prince."

He moved away. A dirty little launch full of uniforms was coming alongside. Until the yellow flag--a polite symbol in that port--should be hauled down Simpson would be left alone. The uniforms had climbed to the deck and were chattering in a b.a.s.t.a.r.d patois behind him; now and then the smell of the town struck across the smells of the sea and the bush like the flick of a snake's tail. Simpson covered his eyes for a moment, and immediately the vision of the island as he had seen it at dawn swam in his mind. But he could not keep his eyes forever shut--there was the necessity of living and of doing his work in the world to be remembered always. He removed his hand. A b.u.mboat was made fast below the well of the deck, and a boy with an obscenely twisted body and a twisted black face was selling pineapples to the sailors.

Simpson watched him for a while, and because his education had been far too closely specialized he quoted the inevitable:

"Where every prospect pleases, And only man is vile"

The verse uplifted him unreasonably. He went below to pack his baggage. He said good-bye to the officers, painfully conscious that they were grinning behind his back, and was rowed ash.o.r.e by the deformed boy.

The boy said something in abominable French. He repeated it--Simpson guessed at its meaning.

"I shall stay a long time," he answered in the same language. "I am a minister of the gospel--a missionary."

The cripple, bent revoltingly over his oar, suddenly broke out into laughter, soulless, without meaning. Simpson, stung sharply in his stiff-necked pride, sprang up and took one step forward, his fist raised. The boy dropped the oars and writhed to starboard, his neck askew at an eldritch angle, his eyes glaring upward. But he did not raise a hand to ward off the blow that he feared, and that was more uncanny still.

The blow never fell. Simpson's hand unclinched and shame reddened in his face.

"Give me the oars," he said. "_Pauvre garcon_--did you think that I would strike you?"

The boy surrendered the oars and sidled aft like a crab, his eyes still rolling at his pa.s.senger.

"Why should the maimed row the sound?" said Simpson.

He rowed awkwardly. The boy watched him for a moment, then grinned uncertainly; presently he lolled back in the stern-sheets, personating dignity. A white man was doing his work--it was splendid, as it should be, and comic in the extreme. He threw back his head and cackled at the hot sky.

"Stop that!" Simpson, his nerves raw, spoke in English, but the laughter jarred to a blunt end. The boy huddled farther away from him, watching him with unwinking eyes which showed white all around the pupil. Simpson, labouring with the clumsy oars, tried to forget him.

It was hot--hotter than it had seemed at first; sweat ran into his eyes and he grew a little dizzy. The quarantine launch with its load of uniforms, among which the purser's white was conspicuous, pa.s.sed, giving them its wake; there was no sound from it, only a blaze of teeth and eyeb.a.l.l.s. Simpson glanced over his shoulder at it. The purser was standing in the stern, clear of the awning, his head quizzically on one side and a cigarette in his fingers.

The rowboat came abreast of a worm-eaten jetty.

"_Ici_," said the cripple.

Simpson, inexpert, b.u.mped into it bow on, and sculled the stern around. The cripple, hideously agile, scrambled out and held the boat; Simpson gathered up his bag and followed.

A Roman priest, black as the top of a stove, strode down the jetty toward them.

"You--you!" he shouted to the cripple when he was yet ten strides away. His voice rose as he approached. "You let the m'sieu' row you ash.o.r.e! You----" A square, heavy boot shot out from beneath his ca.s.sock into the boy's stomach. "_Cochon_!" said the priest, turning to Simpson. His manner became suddenly suave, grandiose. "These swine!" he said. "One keeps them in their place. I am Father Antoine.

And you?"

"Simpson--Arthur Simpson." He said his own name slowly as thought there was magic in it, magic that would keep him in touch with his beginnings.

"Simpson?" The priest gave it the French sound; suspicion struggled for expression on his black mask; his eyes took in the high-cut waistcoat, the unmistakable clerical look. "You were sent?"

"By the board of foreign missions."

"I do not know it. Not by the archbishop?"

"There is no archbishop in my Church."

"In your Church?" Father Antoine's eyes sprang wide--wide as they had been when he kicked the boatman. "In your Church? You are not of the true faith, then?"

Pride of race, unchastened because he had not till that moment been conscious that it existed in him, swelled in Simpson.

"Are you?" he asked.

Father Antoine stared at him, not as an angry white man stares, but with head thrown back and mouth partly open, in the manner of his race. Then, with the unreasoned impetuousness of a charging bull, he turned and flung sh.o.r.eward down the pier. The cripple, groaning still, crawled to Simpson's feet and sat there.

"_Pauvre garcon_!" repeated Simpson dully. "_Pauvre garcon_!"

Suddenly the boy stopped groaning, swung Simpson's kit-bag on his shoulder, and sidled up the pier. His right leg bent outward at the knee, and his left inward; his head, inclined away from his burden, seemed curiously detached from his body; his gait was a halting sort of shuffle; yet he got along with unexpected speed. Simpson, still dazed, followed him into the Grand Rue--a street of smells and piled filth, where gorged buzzards, reeking of the tomb, flapped upward under his nose from the garbage and offal of their feast. Simpson paused for a moment at the market-stalls, where negroes of all shades looked out at him in a silence that seemed devoid of curiosity. The cripple beckoned him and he hurried on. On the steps of the cathedral he saw Father Antoine, but, although the priest must have seen him, he gave no sign as he pa.s.sed. He kept to what shade there was. Presently his guide turned down a narrow alley, opened a dilapidated picket gate, and stood waiting.

"_Maman_!" he called. "_Oh! Maman_!"

Simpson, his curiosity faintly stirring, accepted the invitation of the open gate, and stepped into an untidy yard, where three or four pigs and a dozen chickens rooted and scratched among the bayonets of yucca that cl.u.s.tered without regularity on both sides of the path. The house had some pretensions; there were two stories, and, although the blue and red paint had mostly flaked away, the boarding looked sound.

In the yard there was less fetor than there had been outside.

"_Maman_!" called the boy again.

A pot-lid clashed inside the house, and a tall negress, dressed in a blue-striped Mother Hubbard, came to the door. She stared at Simpson and at the boy.

"_Qui_?" was all she said.

The boy sidled nearer her and dropped the bag on the threshold.

"_Qui_?" she said again.

Simpson waited in silence. His affairs had got beyond him somehow, and he seemed to himself but the tool of circ.u.mstance. It did occur to him, though dimly, that he was being introduced to native life rather quickly.

The cripple, squatting with his back against the bag, launched into a stream of patois, of which Simpson could not understand a word.

Gestures explained somewhat; he was reenacting the scenes of the last half hour. When he had finished, the negress, not so hostile as she had been but by no means friendly, turned to Simpson and looked at him a long time without speaking. He had all he could do not to fidget under her gaze; finally, she stood aside from the door and said, without enthusiasm:

"_B'en venu. C'est vo' ma.s.son_."