O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 20

Simpson had flared up at his last words. His mouth set and his eyes burned suddenly. Bunsen, watching him coolly, wondered that he could kindle so; until that moment he had seemed but half alive. When he spoke his words came hurriedly--were almost unintelligible; yet there was some quality in his voice that compelled attention, affecting the senses more than the mind.

"Unsavoury company? That's best for a parson. 'I come not to bring the righteous but sinners to repentance.' And who are you to brand the woman as common or unclean? If she is a heathen priestess, yet she worships a G.o.d of some sort. Do you?" He stopped suddenly; the humility which men hated in him again blanketed his fanaticism. "It is my task to give her a better G.o.d--the only true G.o.d--Christ."

Bunsen, his legs wide apart, kept his eyes on the sea, for he did not want to let Simpson see him smiling, and he was smiling. Witherbee, who had no emotions of any sort, pulled his moustache farther down and looked at the clergyman as though he were under gla.s.s--a curiosity.

"So you're going to convert the whole island?" he said.

"I hope to make a beginning in the Lord's vineyard."

"Humph! The devil's game-preserve, you mean," Bunsen suddenly broke in.

"The devil's game-preserve, then!" Simpson was defiant.

"The ship calls here every other Sat.u.r.day," was all Bunsen said to that. "You may need to know. I'll send your trunk ash.o.r.e."

He stepped into the cripple's boat and started for the ship. Witherbee did not speak; Simpson, still raging, left him, strode to the end of the pier, and stood there, leaning on a pile.

His gust of emotion had left him; a not unfamiliar feeling of exaltation had taken its place. It is often so with the extreme Puritan type; control relaxed for however brief a moment sends their slow blood whirling, and leaves them light-headed as those who breathe thin air. From boyhood Simpson had been practised in control, until repression had become a prime tenet of his faith. The cheerful and generally innocent excursions of other men a.s.sumed in his mind the proportions of crime, of sin against the stern disciplining of the soul which he conceived to be the goal of life. Probably he had never in all his days been so shocked as once when a young pagan had scorned certain views of his, saying; "There's more education--soul education, if you will have it--in five minutes of sheer joy than in a century of sorrow." It was an appalling statement, that--more appalling because he had tried to contradict it and had been unable to do so. He himself had been too eager to find his work in life--his pre-ordained work--ever to discover the deep truths that light-heartedness only can reveal; even when he heard his call to foreign missions--to Hayti, in particular--he felt no such felicity as a man should feel who has climbed to his place in the scheme of things. His was rather the sombre fury of the Covenanters--an intense conviction that his way was the only way of grace--a conviction that transcended reason and took flight into the realm of overmastering emotion--the only overmastering emotion, by the way, that he had ever experienced.

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 sh.e.l.l has grown to be impregnable from the outside it sets up an internal ferment which sometimes bursts sh.e.l.l and man and all into disastrous fragments. Until old age kills them, the pa.s.sions 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 superst.i.tious, 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 rea.s.sured 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 G.o.d without becoming angry, and very wrong for laymen to discuss G.o.d at all. When circ.u.mstances 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 att.i.tude. 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-k.n.o.bs 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 sc.r.a.p 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 a.s.sented. 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.