by Kate Chopin
“No, I’m no individualist, if to be one is to permit men to fall into hurtful habits without offering protest against it. I’m losing faith in that friend Homeyer, who I strongly suspect is a mythical apology for your own short-comings.”
“Indeed he’s no myth; but a friend who is fond of going into such things and allows me the benefit of his deeper perceptions.”
“You having no time, well understood. But if his influence has had the merit of drawing your thoughts from business once in a while we won’t quarrel with it.”
“Mrs. Lafirme,” said Hosmer, seeming moved to pursue the subject, and addressing the spray of white blossoms that adorned Thérèse’s black hat, “you admit, I suppose, that in urging your views upon me, you have in mind the advancement of my happiness?”
“Well understood.”
“Then why wish to substitute some other form of enjoyment for the one which I find in following my inclinations?”
“Because there is an unsuspected selfishness in your inclinations that works harm to yourself and to those around you. I want you to know,” she continued warmly, “the good things of life that cheer and warm, that are always at hand.”
“Do you think the happiness of Melicent or — or others could be materially lessened by my fondness for money getting?” he asked dryly, with a faint elevation of eyebrow.
“Yes, in proportion as it deprives them of a charm which any man’s society loses, when pursuing one object in life, he grows insensible to every other. But I’ll not scold any more. I’ve made myself troublesome enough for one day. You haven’t asked about Melicent. It’s true,” she laughed, “I haven’t given you much chance. She’s out on the lake with Grégoire.”
“Ah?”
“Yes, in the pirogue. A dangerous little craft, I’m afraid; but she tells me she can swim. I suppose it’s all right.”
“Oh, Melicent will look after herself.”
Hosmer had great faith in his sister Melicent’s ability to look after herself; and it must be granted that the young lady fully justified his belief in her.
“She enjoys her visit more than I thought she would,” he said.
“Melicent’s a dear girl,” replied Thérèse cordially, “and a wise one too in guarding herself against a somber influence that I know,” with a meaning glance at Hosmer, who was preparing to close his desk.
She suddenly perceived the picture of a handsome boy, far back in one of the pigeon-holes, and with the familiarity born of country intercourse, she looked intently at it, remarking upon the boy’s beauty.
“A child whom I loved very much,” said Hosmer. “He’s dead,” and he closed the desk, turning the key in the lock with a sharp click which seemed to add— “and buried.”
Thérèse then approached the open door, leaned her back against its casing, and turned her pretty profile towards Hosmer, who, it need not be supposed, was averse to looking at it — only to being caught in the act.
“I want to look in at the mill before work closes,” she said; and not waiting for an answer she went on to ask — moved by some association of ideas: —
“How is Joçint doing?”
“Always unruly, the foreman tells me. I don’t believe we shall be able to keep him.”
Hosmer then spoke a few words through the telephone which connected with the agent’s desk at the station, put on his great slouch hat, and thrusting keys and hands into his pocket, joined Thérèse in the door-way.
Quitting the office and making a sharp turn to the left, they came in direct sight of the great mill. She quickly made her way past the huge piles of sawed timber, not waiting for her companion, who loitered at each step of the way, with observant watchfulness. Then mounting the steep stairs that led to the upper portions of the mill, she went at once to her favorite spot, quite on the edge of the open platform that overhung the dam. Here she watched with fascinated delight the great logs hauled dripping from the water, following each till it had changed to the clean symmetry of sawed planks. The unending work made her giddy. For no one was there a moment of rest, and she could well understand the open revolt of the surly Joçint; for he rode the day long on that narrow car, back and forth, back and forth, with his heart in the pine hills and knowing that his little Creole pony was roaming the woods in vicious idleness and his rifle gathering an unsightly rust on the cabin wall at home.
The boy gave but ugly acknowledgment to Thérèse’s amiable nod; for he thought she was one upon whom partly rested the fault of this intrusive Industry which had come to fire the souls of indolent fathers with a greedy ambition for gain, at the sore expense of revolting youth.
III. In the Pirogue.
“You got to set mighty still in this pirogue,” said Grégoire, as with a long oar-stroke he pulled out into mid stream.
“Yes, I know,” answered Melicent complacently, arranging herself opposite him in the long narrow boat: all sense of danger which the situation might arouse being dulled by the attractiveness of a new experience.
Her resemblance to Hosmer ended with height and slenderness of figure, olive tinted skin, and eyes and hair which were of that dark brown often miscalled black; but unlike his, her face was awake with an eagerness to know and test the novelty and depth of unaccustomed sensation. She had thus far lived an unstable existence, free from the weight of responsibilities, with a notion lying somewhere deep in her consciousness that the world must one day be taken seriously; but that contingency was yet too far away to disturb the harmony of her days.
She had eagerly responded to her brother’s suggestion of spending a summer with him in Louisiana. Hitherto, having passed her summers North, West, or East as alternating caprice prompted, she was ready at a word to fit her humor to the novelty of a season at the South. She enjoyed in advance the startling effect which her announced intention produced upon her intimate circle at home; thinking that her whim deserved the distinction of eccentricity with which they chose to invest it. But Melicent was chiefly moved by the prospect of an uninterrupted sojourn with her brother, whom she loved blindly, and to whom she attributed qualities of mind and heart which she thought the world had discovered to use against him.
“You got to set mighty still in this pirogue.”
“Yes, I know; you told me so before,” and she laughed.
“W’at are you laughin’ at?” asked Grégoire with amused but uncertain expectancy.
“Laughing at you, Grégoire; how can I help it?” laughing again.
“Betta wait tell I do somethin’ funny, I reckon. Ain’t this a putty sight?” he added, referring to the dense canopy of an overarching tree, beneath which they were gliding, and whose extreme branches dipped quite into the slow moving water.
The scene had not attracted Melicent. For she had been engaged in observing her companion rather closely; his personality holding her with a certain imaginative interest.
The young man whom she so closely scrutinized was slightly undersized, but of close and brawny build. His hands were not so refinedly white as those of certain office bred young men of her acquaintance, yet they were not coarsened by undue toil: it being somewhat an axiom with him to do nothing that an available “nigger” might do for him.
Close fitting, high-heeled boots of fine quality incased his feet, in whose shapeliness he felt a pardonable pride; for a young man’s excellence was often measured in the circle which he had frequented, by the possession of such a foot. A peculiar grace in the dance and a talent for bold repartee were further characteristics which had made Grégoire’s departure keenly felt among certain belles of upper Red River. His features were handsome, of sharp and refined cut; and his eyes black and brilliant as eyes of an alert and intelligent animal sometimes are. Melicent could not reconcile his voice to her liking; it was too softly low and feminine, and carried a note of pleading or pathos, unless he argued with his horse, his dog, or a “nigger,” at which times, though not unduly raised, it acquired a biting quality that served the purpose of relieving him
from further form of insistence.
He pulled rapidly and in silence down the bayou, that was now so entirely sheltered from the open light of the sky by the meeting branches above, as to seem a dim leafy tunnel fashioned by man’s ingenuity. There were no perceptible banks, for the water spread out on either side of them, further than they could follow its flashings through the rank underbrush. The dull plash of some object falling into the water, or the wild call of a lonely bird were the only sounds that broke upon the stillness, beside the monotonous dipping of the oars and the occasional low undertones of their own voices. When Grégoire called the girl’s attention to an object near by, she fancied it was the protruding stump of a decaying tree; but reaching for his revolver and taking quiet aim, he drove a ball into the black upturned nozzle that sent it below the surface with an angry splash.
“Will he follow us?” she asked, mildly agitated.
“Oh no; he’s glad ‘nough to git out o’ the way. You betta put down yo’ veil,” he added a moment later.
Before she could ask a reason — for it was not her fashion to obey at word of command — the air was filled with the doleful hum of a gray swarm of mosquitoes, which attacked them fiercely.
“You didn’t tell me the bayou was the refuge of such savage creatures,” she said, fastening her veil closely about face and neck, but not before she had felt the sharpness of their angry sting.
“I reckoned you’d ‘a knowed all about it: seems like you know everything.” After a short interval he added, “you betta take yo’ veil off.”
She was amused at Grégoire’s authoritative tone and she said to him laughing, yet obeying his suggestion, which carried a note of command: “you shall tell me always, why I should do things.”
“All right,” he replied; “because they ain’t any mo’ mosquitoes; because I want you to see somethin’ worth seein’ afta while; and because I like to look at you,” which he was doing, with the innocent boldness of a forward child. “Ain’t that ‘nough reasons?”
“More than enough,” she replied shortly.
The rank and clustering vegetation had become denser as they went on, forming an impenetrable tangle on either side, and pressing so closely above that they often needed to lower their heads to avoid the blow of some drooping branch. Then a sudden and unlooked for turn in the bayou carried them out upon the far-spreading waters of the lake, with the broad canopy of the open sky above them.
“Oh,” cried Melicent, in surprise. Her exclamation was like a sigh of relief which comes at the removal of some pressure from body or brain.
The wildness of the scene caught upon her erratic fancy, speeding it for a quick moment into the realms of romance. She was an Indian maiden of the far past, fleeing and seeking with her dusky lover some wild and solitary retreat on the borders of this lake, which offered them no seeming foot-hold save such as they would hew themselves with axe or tomahawk. Here and there, a grim cypress lifted its head above the water, and spread wide its moss covered arms inviting refuge to the great black-winged buzzards that circled over and about it in mid-air. Nameless voices — weird sounds that awake in a Southern forest at twilight’s approach, — were crying a sinister welcome to the settling gloom.
“This is a place thet can make a man sad, I tell you,” said Grégoire, resting his oars, and wiping the moisture from his forehead. “I wouldn’t want to be yere alone, not fur any money.”
“It is an awful place,” replied Melicent with a little appreciative shudder; adding “do you consider me a bodily protection?” and feebly smiling into his face.
“Oh; I ain’t ‘fraid o’ any thing I can see an on’erstan’. I can han’le mos’ any thing thet’s got a body. But they do tell some mighty queer tales ‘bout this lake an’ the pine hills yonda.”
“Queer — how?”
“W’y, ole McFarlane’s buried up there on the hill; an’ they’s folks ‘round yere says he walks about o’ nights; can’t res’ in his grave fur the niggas he’s killed.”
“Gracious! and who was old McFarlane?”
“The meanest w’ite man thet ever lived, seems like. Used to own this place long befo’ the Lafirmes got it. They say he’s the person that Mrs. W’at’s her name wrote about in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
“Legree? I wonder if it could be true?” Melicent asked with interest.
“Thet’s w’at they all say: ask any body.”
“You’ll take me to his grave, won’t you Grégoire,” she entreated.
“Well, not this evenin’ — I reckon not. It’ll have to be broad day, an’ the sun shinin’ mighty bright w’en I take you to ole McFarlane’s grave.”
They had retraced their course and again entered the bayou, from which the light had now nearly vanished, making it needful that they watch carefully to escape the hewn logs that floated in numbers upon the water.
“I didn’t suppose you were ever sad, Grégoire,” Melicent said gently.
“Oh my! yes;” with frank acknowledgment. “You ain’t ever seen me w’en I was real lonesome. ‘Tain’t so bad sence you come. But times w’en I git to thinkin’ ‘bout home, I’m boun’ to cry — seems like I can’t he’p it.”
“Why did you ever leave home?” she asked sympathetically.
“You see w’en father died, fo’ year ago, mother she went back to France, t’her folks there; she never could stan’ this country — an’ lef’ us boys to manage the place. Hec, he took charge the firs’ year an’ run it in debt. Placide an’ me did’n’ have no betta luck the naxt year. Then the creditors come up from New Orleans an’ took holt. That’s the time I packed my duds an’ lef’.”
“And you came here?”
“No, not at firs’. You see the Santien boys had a putty hard name in the country. Aunt Thérèse, she’d fallen out with father years ago ‘bout the way, she said, he was bringin’ us up. Father, he wasn’t the man to take nothin’ from nobody. Never ‘lowed any of us to come down yere. I was in Texas, goin’ to the devil I reckon, w’en she sent for me, an’ yere I am.”
“And here you ought to stay, Grégoire.”
“Oh, they ain’t no betta woman in the worl’ then Aunt Thérèse, w’en you do like she wants. See ‘em yonda waitin’ fur us? Reckon they thought we was drowned.”
IV. A Small Interruption.
When Melicent came to visit her brother, Mrs. Lafirme persuaded him to abandon his uncomfortable quarters at the mill and take up his residence in the cottage, which stood just beyond the lawn of the big house. This cottage had been furnished de pied en cap many years before, in readiness against an excess of visitors, which in days gone by was not of infrequent occurrence at Place-du-Bois. It was Melicent’s delighted intention to keep house here. And she foresaw no obstacle in the way of procuring the needed domestic aid in a place which was clearly swarming with idle women and children.
“Got a cook yet, Mel?” was Hosmer’s daily enquiry on returning home, to which Melicent was as often forced to admit that she had no cook, but was not without abundant hope of procuring one.
Betsy’s Aunt Cynthy had promised with a sincerity which admitted not of doubt, that “de Lord willin’ ” she would “be on han’ Monday, time to make de mornin’ coffee.” Which assurance had afforded Melicent a Sunday free of disturbing doubts concerning the future of her undertaking. But who may know what the morrow will bring forth? Cynthy had been “tuck sick in de night.” So ran the statement of the wee pickaninny who appeared at Melicent’s gate many hours later than morning coffee time: delivering his message in a high voice of complaint, and disappearing like a vision without further word.
Uncle Hiram, then called to the breach, had staked his patriarchal honor on the appearance of his niece Suze on Tuesday. Melicent and Thérèse meeting Suze some days later in a field path, asked the cause of her bad faith. The girl showed them all the white teeth which nature had lavished on her, saying with the best natured laugh in the world: “I don’ know how come I didn’ git dere Chewsday like I prom
ise.”
If the ladies were not disposed to consider that an all-sufficient reason, so much the worse, for Suze had no other to offer.
From Mose’s wife, Minervy, better things might have been expected. But after a solemn engagement to take charge of Melicent’s kitchen on Wednesday, the dusky matron suddenly awoke to the need of “holpin’ Mose hoe out dat co’n in the stiff lan.”
Thérèse, seeing that the girl was really eager to play in the brief role of housekeeper had used her powers, persuasive and authoritative, to procure servants for her, but without avail. She herself was not without an abundance of them, from the white-haired Hiram, whose position on the place had long been a sinecure, down to the little brown legged tot Mandy, much given to falling asleep in the sun, when not chasing venturesome poultry off forbidden ground, or stirring gentle breezes with an enormous palm leaf fan about her mistress during that lady’s after dinner nap.
When pressed to give a reason for this apparent disinclination of the negroes to work for the Hosmers, Nathan, who was at the moment being interviewed on the front veranda by Thérèse and Melicent, spoke out.
“Dey ‘low ‘roun’ yere, dat you’s mean to de black folks, ma’am: dat what dey says — I don’ know me.”
“Mean,” cried Melicent, amazed, “in what way, pray?”
“Oh, all sort o’ ways,” he admitted, with a certain shy brazenness; determined to go through with the ordeal.
“Dey ‘low you wants to cut de little gals’ plaits off, an’ sich — I don’ know me.”
“Do you suppose, Nathan,” said Thérèse attempting but poorly to hide her amusement at Melicent’s look of dismay, “that Miss Hosmer would bother herself with darkies’ plaits?”
“Dat’s w’at I tink m’sef. Anyways, I’ll sen’ Ar’minty ‘roun’ to-morrow, sho.”
Melicent was not without the guilty remembrance of having one day playfully seized one of the small Mandy’s bristling plaits, daintily between finger and thumb, threatening to cut them all away with the scissors which she carried. Yet she could not but believe that there was some deeper motive underlying this systematic reluctance of the negroes to give their work in exchange for the very good pay which she offered. Thérèse soon enlightened her with the information that the negroes were very averse to working for Northern people whose speech, manners, and attitude towards themselves were unfamiliar. She was given the consoling assurance of not being the only victim of this boycott, as Thérèse recalled many examples of strangers whom she knew to have met with a like cavalier treatment at the darkies’ hands.