O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 19

Simpson entered automatically. The kitchen, with its hard earth floor and the sunlight drifting in through the bamboo sides, was not unclean, and a savoury smell came from the stew-pot on the ramshackle stove. In one of the bars of sunlight a mango-coloured child of two years or so was playing with his toes--he was surprisingly clean and perfectly formed.

"_Aha, mon pet.i.t_!" exclaimed Simpson. He loved children. "He is handsome," he added, addressing the woman.

"Mine!" She turned the baby gently with her foot; he caught at the hem of her dress, laughing. But she did not laugh. "Neither spot nor blemish," she said, and then: "He is not yet three years old."

Simpson shuddered, recalling the pock-marked drummer on the _Arequipa_. That was momentary--a coincidence, he told himself. The woman was looking down at the child, her eyes softer than they had been, and the child was lying on its back and playing with her Mother Hubbard.

The woman lifted the lid from the pot and peered into it through the sun-shot steam.

"It is ready," she said. She lifted it from the stove and set it on the earthen floor. The cripple placed a handful of knives and spoons on the table and three tin plates; he thrust a long fork and a long spoon into the pot and stood aside.

"Seat yourself," said the woman, without looking at Simpson, "and eat."

She explored the pot with the fork, and stabbed it firmly--there was a suggestion of ruthlessness about her action that made Simpson shudder again--into a slab of meat, which she dropped on a plate, using a callous thumb to disengage it from the tines. She covered it with gravy and began to eat without further ceremony. The cripple followed her example, s...o...b..ring the gravy noisily; some of it ran down his chin. Neither of them paid any attention to Simpson.

He took the remaining plate from the table and stood irresolute with it in his hand. He was hungry, but his essential Puritan fastidiousness, combined with that pride of race which he knew to be un-Christian, rendered him reluctant to dip into the common pot or to eat on equal terms with these people. Besides, the sun and his amazing introduction to the island had given him a raging headache: he could not think clearly nor rid himself of the sinister suggestion of the town, of the house, of its three occupants in particular.

The child touched a ringer to the hot lip of the pot, burned itself, and began to cry.

"_Taise_," said the woman. Her voice was low but curt, and she did not raise her eyes from her plate. The child, its finger in its mouth, stopped crying at once.

Simpson shook himself; his normal point of view was beginning to a.s.sert itself. He must not--must not hold himself superior to the people he expected to convert; nothing, he insisted to himself, was to be gained, and much might be lost by a refusal to meet the people "on their own ground." Chance--he did not call it chance--had favoured him incredibly thus far, and if he failed to follow the guidance that had been vouchsafed him he would prove himself but an unworthy vessel. He took up the long fork--it chattered against the pot as he seized it--and, overcoming a momentary and inexplicable nausea, impaled the first piece of meat that rolled to the surface. There were yams also and a sort of dumpling made of manioc. When he had filled his plate he rose and turned suddenly; the woman and the cripple had stopped eating and were watching him. They did not take their eyes away at once but gave him stare for stare. He sat down; without a word they began to eat once again.

The stew was good, and once he had begun Simpson ate heartily of it.

The tacit devilry fell away from his surroundings as his hunger grew less, and his companions became no more than a middle-aged negress in a turban, a black boy pitifully deformed, and a beautiful child. He looked at his watch--he had not thought of the time for hours--and found that it was a little after noon. It was time that he bestirred himself and found lodgings.

"Is there a hotel?" he asked cheerfully. He had noticed that the islanders understood legitimate French, though they could not speak it.

"There is one," said the woman. She pushed away her plate and became suddenly dourly communicative. "But I doubt if the _proprietaire_ would find room for m'sieu'."

"Has he so many guests, then?"

"But no. M'sieu' has forgotten the priest."

"The priest? What has he to do with it?"

"My son tells me that m'sieu' offended him, and the _proprietaire_ is a good Catholic. He will close his house to you."

She shaved a splinter to a point with a table knife and picked her teeth with it, both elbows on the table and her eyes on Simpson.

"There is nowhere else to stay," she said. "Unless--here."

"I should prefer that," said Simpson--quickly, for reluctance and distrust were rising in him again. "But have you a room?"

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at a door behind her.

"There," she said. Simpson waited for her to move, saw that she had no intention of doing so, and opened the door himself.

The room was fairly large, with two windows screened but unglazed; a canvas cot stood in one corner, a packing-box table and a decrepit chair in another. Like the kitchen it was surprisingly clean. He returned to his hostess, who showed no anxiety about his intentions.

"How much by the week?" he asked.

"Eight _gourdes_."

"And you will feed me for how much?"

"Fifteen _gourdes_."

"I will take it." He forced himself to decision again; had he hesitated he knew he would have gone elsewhere. The price also--less than four dollars gold--attracted him, and he could doubtless buy some furniture in the town. Moreover, experienced missionaries who had talked before the board had always emphasized the value of living among the natives.

"_B'en_," said the negress. She rose and emptied the remains from her plate into a tin pail, sponging the plate with a piece of bread.

"I have a trunk on the steamer," said Simpson. "The boy--can he----"

"He will go with you," the negress interrupted.

The cripple slid from his chair, sc.r.a.ped his plate and Simpson's, put on his battered straw hat, and shambled into the yard. Simpson followed.

He turned at the gate and looked back. The child had toddled to the door and was standing there, holding on to the door-post. Inside, the shadow of the woman flickered across the close bars of bamboo.

II

Bunsen was standing on the jetty when they reached it talking excitedly with a tall bowed man of fifty or so whose complexion showed the stippled pallor of long residence in the tropics.

"Here he is now!" Bunsen exclaimed as Simpson approached. "I was just getting anxious about you. Stopped at the hotel--you hadn't been there, they said. Port au Prince is a bad place to get lost in.

Oh--this gentleman is our consul. Mr. Witherbee--Mr. Simpson."

Simpson shook hands. Witherbee's face was just a pair of dull eyes behind a ragged moustache, but there was unusual vigour in his grip.

"I'll see a lot of you, if you stay long," he said. He looked at Simpson more closely. "At least, I hope so. But where have you been? I was getting as anxious as Mr. Bunsen--afraid you'd been sacrificed to the snake or something."

Simpson raised a clerical hand, protesting. His amazing morning swept before his mind like a moving-picture film; there were so many things he could not explain even to himself, much less to these two Gentiles.

"I found lodgings," he said.

"Lodgings?" Witherbee and Bunsen chorused the word. "Where, for heaven's sake?"

"I don't know the name of the street," Simpson admitted. "I don't even know the name of my hostess. That"--indicating the cripple--"is her son."

"Good G.o.d!" Witherbee exclaimed. "Madame Picard! The _mamaloi_!"

"The--the what?" But Simpson had heard well enough.

"The _mamaloi_--the _mamaloi_--high priestess of voodoo."

"Her house is fairly clean," Simpson said. He was hardly aware of his own inconsequence. It was his instinct to defend any one who was attacked on moral grounds, whether they deserved the attack or not.

"Ye-es," Witherbee drawled. "I dare say it is. It's her company that's unsavoury. Especially for a parson. Eh? What's the matter now?"