“The latter,” remarked Edward, who had come up unobserved.
They gazed at each other unflinchingly. They had come to open battle during those last days, and I knew that the end was near. Their words had been cold as ice, cutting as steel, and I said to myself, “At any moment.” There would be a deadly struggle, and then Christine would yield. Even I comprehended something of what that yielding would be.
“Why do they hate each other so?” Felipa said to me sadly.
“Do they hate each other?”
“Yes, for I feel it here,” she answered, touching her breast with a dramatic little gesture.
“Nonsense! Go and play with your doll, child.” For I had made her a respectable, orderly doll to take the place of the ungainly fetich out on the barren.
Felipa gave me a look and walked away. A moment afterward she brought the doll out of the house before my very eyes, and, going down to the end of the dock, deliberately threw it into the water; the tide was flowing out, and away went my toy-woman out of sight, out to sea.
“Well!” I said to myself. “What next?”
I had not told Felipa we were going; I thought it best to let it take her by surprise. I had various small articles of finery ready as farewell gifts, which should act as sponges to absorb her tears. But Fate took the whole matter out of my hands. This is how it happened: One evening in the jasmine arbor, in the fragrant darkness of the warm spring night, the end came; Christine was won. She glided in like a wraith, and I, divining at once what had happened, followed her into her little room, where I found her lying on her bed, her hands clasped on her breast, her eyes open and veiled in soft shadows, her white robe drenched with dew. I kissed her fondly—I never could help loving her then or now—and next I went out to find Edward. He had been kind to me all my poor gray life; should I not go to him now? He was still in the arbor, and I sat down by his side quietly; I knew that the words would come in time. They came; what a flood! English was not enough for him. He poured forth his love in the rich-voweled Spanish tongue also; it has sounded doubly sweet to me ever since.
“Have you felt the wool of the beaver?
Or swan’s down ever?
Or have smelt the bud o’ the brier?
Or the nard in the fire?
Or ha’ tasted the bag o’ the bee?
Oh so white, oh so soft, oh so sweet is she!”
said the young lover; and I, listening there in the dark fragrant night, with the dew heavy upon me, felt glad that the old simple-hearted love was not entirely gone from our tired metallic world.
It was late when we returned to the house. After reaching my room I found that I had left my cloak in the arbor. It was a strong fabric; the dew could not hurt it, but it could hurt my sketching materials and various trifles in the wide inside pockets—objets de luxe to me, souvenirs of happy times, little artistic properties that I hang on the walls of my poor studio when in the city. I went softly out into the darkness again and sought the arbor; groping on the ground I found, not the cloak, but—Felipa! She was crouched under the foliage, face downward; she would not move or answer.
“What is the matter, child?” I said, but she would not speak. I tried to draw her from her lair, but she tangled herself stubbornly still farther among the thorny vines, and I could not move her. I touched her neck; it was cold. Frightened, I ran back to the house for a candle.
“Go away,” she said in a low hoarse voice when I flashed the light over her. “I know all, and I am going to die. I have eaten the poison things in your box, and just now a snake came on my neck and I let him. He has bitten me, and I am glad. Go away; I am going to die.”
I looked around; there was my color-case rifled and empty, and the other articles were scattered on the ground. “Good Heavens, child!” I cried, “what have you eaten?”
“Enough,” replied Felipa gloomily. “I knew they were poisons; you told me so. And I let the snake stay.”
By this time the household, aroused by my hurried exit with the candle, came toward the arbor. The moment Edward appeared Felipa rolled herself up like a hedgehog again and refused to speak. But the old grandmother knelt down and drew the little crouching figure into her arms with gentle tenderness, smoothing its hair and murmuring loving words in her soft dialect.
“What is it?” said Edward; but even then his eyes were devouring Christine, who stood in the dark vine-wreathed doorway like a picture in a frame. I explained.
Christine smiled. “Jealousy,” she said in a low voice. “I am not surprised.”
But at the first sound of her voice Felipa had started up, and, wrenching herself free from old Dominga’s arms, threw herself at Christine’s feet. “Look at me so,” she cried—“me too; do not look at him. He has forgotten poor Felipa; he does not love her any more. But you do not forget, señora; you love me—you love me. Say you do, or I shall die!”
We were all shocked by the pallor and the wild, hungry look of her uplifted face. Edward bent down and tried to lift her in his arms; but when she saw him a sudden fierceness came into her eyes; they shot out yellow light and seemed to narrow to a point of flame. Before we knew it she had turned, seized something, and plunged it into his encircling arm. It was my little Venetian dagger.
We sprang forward; our dresses were spotted with the fast-flowing blood; but Edward did not relax his hold on the writhing, wild little body he held until it lay exhausted in his arms. “I am glad I did it,” said the child, looking up into his face with her inflexible eyes. “Put me down—put me down, I say, by the gracious señora, that I may die with the trailing of her white robe over me.” And the old grandmother with trembling hands received her and laid her down mutely at Christine’s feet.
Ah, well! Felipa did not die. The poisons racked but did not kill her, and the snake must have spared the little thin brown neck so despairingly offered to him. We went away; there was nothing for us to do but to go away as quickly as possible and leave her to her kind. To the silent old grandfather I said: “It will pass; she is but a child.”
“She is nearly twelve, señora. Her mother was married at thirteen.”
“But she loved them both alike, Bartolo. It is nothing; she does not know.”
“You are right, lady; she does not know,” replied the old man slowly; “but I know. It was two loves, and the stronger thrust the knife.”
King David
I met a traveler on the road;
His face was wan, his feet were weary;
Yet he unresting went with such
A strange, still, patient mien—a look
Set forward in the empty air,
As he were reading an unseen book.
RICHARD WATSON GILDER
THE scholars were dismissed. Out they trooped—big boys, little boys, and full-grown men. Then what antics—what linked lines of scuffling; what double shuffles, leaps, and somersaults; what rolling laughter, interspersed with short yelps and guttural cries, as wild and free as the sounds the mustangs make, gamboling on the plains! For King David’s scholars were black—black as the ace of spades. He did not say that; he knew very little about the ace. He said simply that his scholars were “colored”; and sometimes he called them “the Children of Ham.” But so many mistakes were made over this title, in spite of his careful explanations (the Children having an undoubted taste for bacon), that he finally abandoned it, and fell back upon the national name of “freedmen,” a title both good and true. He even tried to make it noble, speaking to them often of their wonderful lot as the emancipated teachers and helpers of their race; laying before them their mission in the future, which was to go over to Africa, and wake out of their long sloth and slumber the thousands of souls there. But Cassius and Pompey had only a mythic idea of Africa; they looked at the globe as it was turned around, they saw it there on the other side, and then their
attention wandered off to an adventurous ant who was making the tour of Soodan and crossing the mountains of Kong as though they were nothing.
Lessons over, the scholars went home. The schoolmaster went home too, wiping his forehead as he went. He was a grave young man, tall and thin, somewhat narrow-chested, with the diffident air of a country student. And yet this country student was here, far down in the South, hundreds of miles away from the New Hampshire village where he had thought to spend his life as teacher of the district school. Extreme near-sightedness and an inherited delicacy of constitution which he bore silently had kept him out of the field during the days of the war. “I should be only an encumbrance,” he thought. But, when the war was over, the fire which had burned within burst forth in the thought, “The freedmen!” There was work fitted to his hand; that one thing he could do. “My turn has come at last,” he said. “I feel the call to go.” Nobody cared much because he was leaving. “Going down to teach the blacks?” said the farmers. “I don’t see as you’re called, David. We’ve paid dear enough to set ’em free, goodness knows, and now they ought to look out for themselves.”
“But they must first be taught,” said the schoolmaster. “Our responsibility is great; our task is only just begun.”
“Stuff!” said the farmers. What with the graves down in the South, and the taxes up in the North, they were not prepared to hear any talk about beginning. Beginning, indeed! They called it ending. The slaves were freed, and it was right they should be freed; but Ethan and Abner were gone, and their households were left unto them desolate. Let the blacks take care of themselves.
So, all alone, down came David King, with such aid and instruction as the Freedman’s Bureau could give him, to this little settlement among the pines, where the freedmen had built some cabins in a careless way, and then seated themselves to wait for fortune. Freedmen! Yes; a glorious idea! But how will it work its way out into practical life? What are you going to do with tens of thousands of ignorant, childish, irresponsible souls thrown suddenly upon your hands; souls that will not long stay childish, and that have in them also all the capacities for evil that you yourselves have—you with your safeguards of generations of conscious responsibility and self-government, and yet—so many lapses! This is what David King thought. He did not see his way exactly; no, nor the nation’s way. But he said to himself: “I can at least begin; if I am wrong, I shall find it out in time. But now it seems to me that our first duty is to educate them.” So he began at “a, b, and c”; “You must not steal”; “You must not fight”; “You must wash your faces”; which may be called, I think, the first working out of the emancipation problem.
Jubilee Town was the name of the settlement; and when the schoolmaster announced his own, David King, the title struck the imitative minds of the scholars, and, turning it around, they made “King David” of it, and kept it so. Delighted with the novelty, the Jubilee freedmen came to school in such numbers that the master was obliged to classify them; boys and men in the mornings and afternoons; the old people in the evenings; the young women and girls by themselves for an hour in the early morning. “I can not do full justice to all,” he thought, “and in the men lies the danger, in the boys the hope; the women can not vote. Would to God the men could not either, until they have learned to read and to write, and to maintain themselves respectably!” For, abolitionist as he was, David King would have given years of his life for the power to restrict the suffrage. Not having this power, however, he worked at the problem in the only way left open: “Take two apples from four apples, Julius—how many will be left?” “What is this I hear, Cæsar, about stolen bacon?”
On this day the master went home, tired and dispirited; the novelty was over on both sides. He had been five months at Jubilee, and his scholars were more of a puzzle to him than ever. They learned, some of them, readily; but they forgot as readily. They had a vast capacity for parrot-like repetition, and caught his long words so quickly, and repeated them so volubly, with but slight comprehension of their meaning, that his sensitive conscience shrank from using them, and he was forced back upon a rude plainness of speech which was a pain to his pedagogic ears. Where he had once said, “Demean yourselves with sobriety,” he now said, “Don’t get drunk.” He would have fared better if he had learned to say “uncle” and “aunty,” or “maumer,” in the familiar Southern fashion. But he had no knowledge of the customs; how could he have? He could only blunder on in his slow Northern way.
His cabin stood in the pine forest, at a little distance from the settlement; he had allowed himself that grace. There was a garden around it, where Northern flowers came up after a while—a little pale, perhaps, like English ladies in India, but doubly beautiful and dear to exiled eyes. The schoolmaster had cherished from the first a wish for a cotton-field—a cotton-field of his own. To him a cotton-field represented the South—a cotton-field in the hot sunshine, with a gang of slaves toiling under the lash of an overseer. This might have been a fancy picture, and it might not. At any rate, it was real to him. There was, however, no overseer now, and no lash; no slaves and very little toil. The negroes would work only when they pleased, and that was generally not at all. There was no doubt but that they were almost hopelessly improvident and lazy. “Entirely so,” said the planters. “Not quite,” said the Northern schoolmaster. And therein lay the difference between them.
David lighted his fire of pitch-pine, spread his little table, and began to cook his supper carefully. When it was nearly ready, he heard a knock at his gate. Two representative specimens of his scholars were waiting without—Jim, a field-hand, and a woman named Esther, who had been a house-servant in a planter’s family. Jim had come “to borry an axe,” and Esther to ask for medicine for a sick child.
“Where is your own axe, Jim?” said the schoolmaster.
“Somehow et’s rusty, sah. Dey gets rusty mighty quick.”
“Of course, because you always leave them out in the rain. When will you learn to take care of your axes?”
“Don’ know, mars.”
“I have told you not to call me master,” said David. “I am not your master.”
“You’s schoolmars, I reckon,” answered Jim, grinning at his repartee.
“Well, Jim,” said the schoolmaster, relaxing into a smile, “you have the best of it this time; but you know quite well what I mean. You can take the axe; but bring it back to-night. And you must see about getting a new one immediately; there is something to begin with.—Now, Esther, what is it? Your boy sick? Probably it is because you let him drink the water out of that swampy pool. I warned you.”
“Yes, sah,” said the woman impassively.
She was a slow, dull-witted creature, who had executed her tasks marvelously well in the planter’s family, never varying by a hair’s breadth either in time or method during long years. Freed, she was lost at once; if she had not been swept along by her companions, she would have sat down dumbly by the wayside, and died. The schoolmaster offered supper to both of his guests. Jim took a seat at the table at once, nothing loath, and ate and drank, talking all the time with occasional flashes of wit, and an unconscious suggestion of ferocity in the way he hacked and tore the meat with his clasp-knife and his strong white teeth. Esther stood; nothing could induce her to sit in the master’s presence. She ate and drank quietly, and dropped a courtesy whenever he spoke to her, not from any especial respect or gratitude, however, but from habit. “I may possibly teach the man something,” thought the schoolmaster; “but what a terrible creature to turn loose in the world, with power in his hand! Hundreds of these men will die, nay, must die violent deaths before their people can learn what freedom means, and what it does not mean. As for the woman, it is hopeless; she can not learn. But her child can. In truth, our hope is in the children.”
And then he threw away every atom of the food, washed his dishes, made up the fire, and went back to the beginning again and cooked a second supper.
For he still shrank from personal contact with the other race. A Southerner would have found it impossible to comprehend the fortitude it required for the New-Englander to go through his daily rounds among them. He did his best; but it was duty, not liking. Supper over, he went to the schoolhouse again: in the evenings he taught the old people. It was an odd sight to note them as they followed the letters with a big, crooked forefinger, slowly spelling out words of three letters. They spelled with their whole bodies, stooping over the books which lay before them until their old grizzled heads and gay turbans looked as if they were set on the table by the chins in a long row. Patiently the master taught them; they had gone no further than “cat” in five long months. He made the letters for them on the blackboard again and again, but the treat of the evening was the making of these letters on the board by the different scholars in turn. “Now, Dinah—B.” And old Dinah would hobble up proudly, and, with much screwing of her mouth and tongue, and many long hesitations, produce something which looked like a figure eight gone mad. Joe had his turn next, and he would make, perhaps, an H for a D. The master would go back and explain to him carefully the difference, only to find at the end of ten minutes that the whole class was hopelessly confused: Joe’s mistake had routed them all. There was one pair of spectacles among the old people: these were passed from hand to hand as the turn came, not from necessity always, but as an adjunct to the dignity of reading.
“Never mind the glasses, Tom. Surely you can spell ‘bag’ without them.”
“Dey helps, Mars King David,” replied old Tom with solemn importance. He then adorned himself with the spectacles, and spelled it—“g, a, b.”
But the old people enjoyed their lesson immensely; no laughter, no joking broke the solemnity of the scene, and they never failed to make an especial toilet—much shirt-collar for the old men, and clean turbans for the old women. They seemed to be generally half-crippled, poor old creatures; slow in their movements as tortoises, and often unwieldy; their shoes were curiosities of patches, rags, strings, and carpeting. But sometimes a fine old black face was lifted from the slow-moving bulk, and from under wrinkled eyelids keen sharp eyes met the master’s, as intelligent as his own.
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