The Eighth Day

by Thornton Wilder

  Roger wrote to Constance: “They worked from before dawn to after sunset. Hardly a one of them sat down in daylight. No lawyers, few merchants, no bankers (one—your grandfather Ashley), no factory workers. They were all what you’re now calling ‘self-employed’.” Constance wrote back: “Yes, self-employed, self-centered, and self-serving. All so proud of their independence of mind. Independent for small ends. I hate them all. It explains why darling Papa had so little imagination and Mama none.”

  But there was another side of the coin. There were morbid elements in both the Ashley and Kellerman lines. It was not only the strong-minded uncoercible patriarchs who were drawn to the “freedom” of the new world. The scoundrel, the fanatic, the footloose, the adventurer—fiercely independent, every one of them, and of lively imagination—that is to say: suspended on the promises of a golden future, they “skipped” to America. The genealogists found disease and insanity. That very bourgade outside Tours from which the Boisgelins and Dubois emigrated to the new world served as subject of a pioneering sociological study, a French counterpart of our “Jukes and Kallikaks.” Moreover, it was discovered that John Ashley’s own grandfather Ashley, who had run away from his Dubois wife, was hanged in the Klondike by an outraged community. Fortunately this morbid material did not reach a wide circle of readers. It was sufficiently troubling that the shadow of the Ashley case hung over John Ashley’s children. Moreover it cannot be denied that many observers were of the opinion that the Ashleys were, one and all—to put it frankly—“immoral.” “They haven’t a glimmer of decent Christian ethical behavior.” “They’ve made it perfectly clear that they don’t give a snap of their fingers what right-minded self-respecting people think of them.” There was always a certain amount of that.

  But enough of these matters! Health and sanity are precarious and must be paid for. Well-being and common sense invent nothing, discover nothing; they fall back into the humus. As Dr. Gillies said during the first hour of the century (and didn’t believe a word of it): “Nature never sleeps or even stands still. Her men are in constant discomfort from growing pains. What they are outgrowing causes them as much suffering as what they are acquiring.”

  Few of these genealogists and biographers observed—or, at least, attempted to describe—what we have called the Ashley “abstraction” or “disattachment.” Perhaps it was their enemies who saw it most clearly. In particular there was a chapter on them—it was called the “Gracchi”—in a privately printed volume America Through a Telescope by a writer who called himself “Atticus.” This “Atticus” declared himself to be happy to have left America for the shores of the Thames and the Seine. From that safe distance, having taken out British citizenship, he reviewed the horrors and absurdities of his native land. He attacked the Ashleys with surprising virulence. He appears to have known them well (especially Constance Ashley-Nishimura) and enriched his portraits with many stories not hitherto in circulation. Atticus stressed their propensity to commit social errors. It seems to have particularly annoyed him that they remained unabashed by these inelegant faux pas. It is true: certain discriminations were missing in the Ashleys. They were unable to disinguish shades of rank, wealth, birth, color, or servitude. In addition, Atticus felt that they were lacking in self-respect. They were slow to anger. They were serene under snub and insult. He was unable to deny their intelligence, but characterized it as lacking “suppleness” and charm. He reserved his most biting depreciation for the end of his chapter. The last paragraph developed the idea that the Ashleys were—indubitably (he hated to say it, but the truth must come out; they were indubitably) Americans.

  V. “ST. KITTS”

  1880–1905

  “Why did Stacey marry Breck.”

  Like so many others in Coaltown, Dr. Gillies often asked himself how it was possible that Eustacia Sims so far lost her senses as to marry Breckenridge Lansing. We shall hear later how Dr. Gillies explained it to himself—an explanation based on a farfetched notion and condensed in a phrase that never failed to exasperate his wife, who said that it was in bad grammar:

  “We keep saying that we ‘live our lives.’ Shucks! Life lives us.”

  Breckenridge Lansing was born in Crystal Lake, Iowa. As a boy he planned to enter the Army of the United States and to become a famous general. With his brother Fisher he did a great deal of hunting. Good Baptists cannot take life or do anything else enjoyable on Sunday, but they killed and killed on Saturdays and holidays. His marksmanship was so accurate that he aspired to enter West Point. It surprised and disgusted him to learn that future Army officers are required to have a considerable knowledge of mathematics. He repeatedly failed the entrance examinations. During his years at Brockett Baptist College he started to prepare himself for the ministry, then for medicine, then for the law. He ended up as an untrained assistant in his father’s drugstore.

  His father was a loud-laughing man, a leader in clubs and lodges, a good businessman, a hard contemptuous husband and father. Most of these qualifications he inherited from his father and transmitted to his sons. He held offices—from banquet manager to vice president—in the Middle States Pharmaceutical Association, and took great pleasure in attending the association’s conventions. It was his habit there to sit up late, night after night, playing cards with his fellow officers. In those days every enterprising druggist tried to get into the patent medicine (or “snake oil”) business. Mr. Lansing despised and feared his older son, Fisher (“Call me Fish”), who had become a lawyer; he merely despised Breckenridge, who was making a nuisance of himself in the store and in the town. Breckenridge had studied some chemistry in his premedical phase. His father set him to mixing brews in a shed behind the drugstore. He dreamed of a “Lansing Liniment” or of a “Mrs. Lansing’s Wild Honey Elixir.” Young Lansing got no further than establishing a strong alcohol base and writing the promises to be printed on the label. His laboratory became a social center and his experiments frequently occupied him until dawn.

  One night during a card game in St. Louis a colleague offered the elder Lansing an opportunity to invest money in a new firm manufacturing some products derived from an attar of the West Indian bay tree. This essence, mixed with rum, oil of orange, and other ingredients, had a variety of medicinal and cosmetic uses. It was also reportedly consumed in large quantities by unhappy ladies who had taken the “Pledge.” Lansing sold two pastures and a corner lot; he invested a considerable amount of money in the enterprise. As always, however, he had more than one end in view. He wanted to make money and he wanted to get young Breckenridge out of Crystal Lake. Taking his son with him he went to New York and called at the office of the manufacturing company. He even gave a dinner at Halloran’s Steak and Lobster House. The boy made a favorable first impression. He always did. He was engaged as purchasing agent of raw materials. The oils and the rum came from the Leeward Islands. Breckenridge went to the Caribbean and it was there, on the island of St. Kitts, that he met Eustacia Sims.

  This young lady came of an English family that had lived in the islands since the early eighteenth century. Generation after generation, the Simses had married into the Creole families of the Antilles. By now there was a very small measure of English blood in his veins, but Eustacia’s father, Alexander Sims, was every inch an Englishman. He not only observed the royal birthdays, but on October 21 he raised the flag at dawn to commemorate the glorious victory at Trafalgar and later lowered it to half mast to mark the death of Lord Nelson. His womenfolk—there were many of them; both his grandmothers and several great-aunts lived to a hundred—had other loyalties. They were indissolubly French, British by citizenship only. They had cousins on every island from Charlotte Amalie to St. Lucia. Guadeloupe was their ancestral Eden. Like every self-respecting Creole they claimed cousinship with Josephine, Empress of France. These ladies sat all day on the verandah of Alexander Sims’s house, fanning themselves, discussing the neighbors, and waiting for the next meal. Marie-Madeleine Dutellier Sims was enormous, voluble, an
d unhappy. She appeared to be a self-indulgent and mindless woman. She had been reduced to this appearance by idleness, humiliation, and boredom. In large part she was responsible for her own idleness. She was so capable a manager that her family—eleven to sixteen heads, including the various dependent relatives—were admirably waited upon by five servants; four others were retained for ostentation. These servants were supposedly paid three shillings a month, but they had little need of money. Their meals, clothing, medical care, whippings, and amusement were supplied by their masters. “Madame Seems” had left herself nothing to do but to command. Her humiliations she shared with other matrons of the community. Alexander Sims had another family in Basseterre. It lived in a village of thatched roofings, barely protected from the torrential rains and often carried away by a high wind. Such a second family was required—or at least expected—of every upstanding householder. It was so numerous that one could have counted the half-clad boys and girls only if they had improbably stayed motionless for a moment. He often failed to recognize his progeny when he came upon one or other of them on the Prince Albert Wharf or on the Queen Victoria Parade. When their father—white, rich, important, quick to anger—visited their home they disappeared into the surrounding fronds. Boredom—particularly Mrs. Sim’s—should not be mistaken for lethargy. Boredom is energy frustrated of outlet. She had been a woman of forceful character; little of it was left except her towering rages. Her ancestors, before they settled down to cultivate sugar, had been seamen, adventurers, and buccaneers. She believed that she came of an even more romantic ancestry.

  These islands had often been landfall and first haven for the slave ships from Africa. Here they put ashore the sick and dying; here they rid themselves of their troublemakers—those whom neither blows nor starvation could subdue. These recalcitrants were generally the strongest of the young men; even emaciated they would fetch a high price on the mainland. The captains, however, were willing to sell them to the island planters at a loss. The ships had weeks ahead of them. Even in chains these men were dangerous; they disseminated unrest. One of the most famous of these was Bel-Amadé, a prince of the Ashanti, long since entered into ballad and legend. He was auctioned in Guadeloupe in about 1759. There he bided his time; he became an exemplary and almost trusted foreman. He was a mighty singer; he was mirthful. He delighted in children; children delighted in him. His master often asked him to sing for his guests—the ladies sipping chocolimiel from cups of Sèvres. A ballad tells us that “His back was like the tallest cedar; his eyes were like the lightning.” The ballad goes on to say that he had a hundred children—royal, all of them.

  Came the Night of St. Joseph, the nineteenth of March, the night of wrath, the night of long sickles. The smoke that arose from thirteen great plantations could be seen from Martinique. So great was the force of Bel-Amadé’s mind that even the faithful servants—the trusted major domo, the cook, the lady’s maid, the children’s mamée—did little to avert the massacre. The Night of St. Joseph! The night is, of course, remembered with horror. But grandeur in revolt against oppression has a way of capturing our adherence—as readers of Milton’s poem know. Slavery enslaves the slaveowner and with the passage of time the proud man is revealed as a fool. Bel-Amadé was caught, castrated, and hung from a tree to die in long agony. He became a bogey with whom to threaten children, but the imagination of a people is no stickler for consistency. It was said of any tall straight young man, of any radiant bold young woman—in a whisper—“Y a la une goutte du sang du beau diable!” One evening after the ladies on the verandah had been discussing the Night of St. Joseph and its instigator, Eustacia, eight years old, approached her mother.

  “Maman, est-ce que nous . . . ? est-ce que nous . . . ??”

  “Quoi? Quoi, nous?”

  “Est-ce que nous sommes descendues . . . ? de Lui?”

  “Tais-toi, petite sotte. Nous sommes parentes de l’Impératrice. C’est assez, je crois.”

  “Mais, Maman, réponds.”

  Her mother turned on her daughter a dark and heavily powdered face. Her eyes were proud and stern. She held Eustacia’s gaze a moment. Her expression said, “Of course, we are!” Aloud, she said, “Tais-toi, petite idiote!—Et mouche-toi!”

  Eustacia Sims Lansing and her children had inherited from somewhere their violent tempers, their passion for independence, and—with the exception of Anne, who took after her father—their interesting coloring.

  Alexander Sims owned and operated a general store on the waterfront in Basseterre. All his daughters were beautiful; one was intelligent. As soon as she was able, Eustacia left the society on the verandah and became her father’s assistant in the store. She was seventeen. She was soon running the store and running it very well, under difficulty. Her beauty was a constant burden and trial to her. The youths of the island and the sailors of all nations laid unremitting siege; their every purchase was protracted with hesitations, whispered invitations, and declarations of love. She dressed severely; she curbed her wit. She neither expressed nor felt scorn; she merely became remote. She acquired the nickname of “La Cangueneuse”—a word derived from the stock collar worn by French officers in the eighteenth century, so stiff and high that the wearer was unable to lower his chin. Her capability first astonished, then delighted her father. It enabled him to fulfill an ambition; he obtained a post in the customs house where he could wear a uniform all day. He could serve his sovereign.

  Twice a day Eustacia’s eyes lost their unloving glaze; once—where there were few to see—at the earliest mass, and once—late at night, in treasured solitude—when she unlocked the snowy wonder of her trousseau.

  She knew her vocation. She knew why she had been born into the world. It was to love; to be a wife and mother. She had seen no examples of the kind of marriage to which she aspired. She invented marriage. She raised an edifice. A bird hatched from an egg in a dark room can build a nest without having seen one. She assembled fragments from the admonitions of priests at weddings, from passages in the few romans roses that circulated on the island, from the very marriages she saw about her—tired, spiritless, insulted, at best resigned—from altar paintings. It is given to some to “idealize” continuously and strongly, as a Bombyx mori secretes silk. Eustacia Sims intended to give and receive all the plenitude of the earth by love; to grow seven feet tall by love; to have ten children—Chevalier Bayards, Joséphines—by love; to merit her beauty by love; to live to a hundred, bowed down beneath the crowns of love. She would remain simple and humble—yes, leaving her two score children and grandchildren outside the church, she would kneel in the side chapel—as she did now—only asking acceptance of a woman’s life in love. She had arrived at the age of nineteen without having glimpsed a man, young or old, who could be imagined as sharing this life with her. Eustacia was as healthy in mind as in body. She did not indulge in disdain, but she knew all the marriageable young men in the region (they were all, more or less, her cousins); she knew the landscape of their minds, the good and the bad. It was certain that her husband would not come from these islands. Her interest quickened when she heard foreign languages spoken. She doubted that there were more beautiful lands in the world than her own, but she could easily believe that there were countries less steeped in vanity, malice, sloth, and contempt for women. She cast searching glances at the German, Italian, Russian, and Scandinavian officers who visited the port; but held herself aloof from their overtures. Her husband would not be a seaman absent on long voyages from the home they would build together.

  She waited. Her mother, from her vast rattan chair, watched Eustacia’s progress and understood her problem. She worried about her own: she had three older daughters to marry off, but the island’s marriageable young men had eyes only for her youngest. She was constantly being approached by the first citizens on the island, and by the priests—“Chère madame . . . ? Jean-Baptiste’s Antoine is an exellent young man . . . ? will inherit . . . ? good habits . . . ? very much in love with your daughter
Eustacia. Could you speak to your daughter, Madame Marie-Madeleine?”

  One evening she called Eustacia into her bedroom.

  “Now, my daughter, for two years you’ve been refusing every offer that comes to us. You refuse to marry and you stand in the way of your sisters’ getting married. What is it you want?”

  “Maman, are you angry with me for working in the store?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you angry with me? Is it my fault that Antoine and Mémé and le petit à Beaurepaire want to marry me? They are nice boys. I like them. I do not love them. Maman, they waste my time when I have work to do.”

  “So!—Now listen to me, Eustachie.”

  Apparently in France when a pretty girl must go alone on a journey, by public coach, or on one of those railway trains, she is often annoyed. She is pushed and pinched and followed by young men and old men who have no fear of God. What do those modest girls do? They brush their foreheads and their cheeks with le vert de houx. It does not hurt the skin. You can wash it off in a moment. It merely removes the glow of youth. It gives a gray pallor—even a faintly green tinge—to the skin. The shameless men leave the dear girls alone!

  “What do you think of that, ma fille?”

  “Maman, angel. Maman, have you some of this vert de houx?”

  “Here on the island we have no holly, but we have something else. We have the root called borqui, or some call it boraqui. Look!”