NIVERSITY.OF CA RIVERSIDE. LIBRARY 3 1210018385078 UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME The Celestial Omnibus and other Stories. By E. M. Forster. With End-papers and Cover-design by Roger Fry. 1911. Second Impression. The Temple on the Hill : a Tale of Transylvania. By Elsa de Szasz. 1912. The Third Miss Symons. By F. M. Mayor. With a Pre face by John Masefield. 1913. Vain Oblations Stories: by Katharine(F. Gerould London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd. Adam Street, Adelphi, W.C. 1914 TO J. M. F. AND B. M. F. CONTENTS PACK VAIN OBLATIONS i THE MANGO-SEED 39 THE WINE OF VIOLENCE 76 ON THE STAIRCASE 116 THE TORTOISE 161 THE DIVIDED KINGDOM 212 THE CASE OF PARAMORE 249 VAIN OBLATIONS AS I was with Saxe during the four most desperate weeks of his life, I think I may say that I knew him better than any one else. Those were also the four most articulate weeks, for they were a period of terrible in action, spent on the decks of ocean steamships. Saxe was not much given to talking, but there was nothing else to do. No book that has ever been written could have held his attention for two minutes. I was with him, for that matter, off and on, until the end. What I have to tell I got partly from my own observ ations, partly from a good little woman at the Mission, partly from Saxe's letters, largely from his own lips, and partly from natives. But if I recorded it as it came, unassimilated, unchronologized one fact often limping into camp six months after its own result the story would be as unintelligible as the quipus of the Incas. It has taken me three years of steady staring to see the thing whole. I VAIN OBLATIONS know more about it now including Saxe than Saxe ever knew. In point of fact, one of the most significant pieces of evidence did not come in until after his death. (I wish it clearly understood, by the way, that Saxe did not commit suicide.) But, more than that, I have been thinking for three years about Mary Bradford. I could tell you as much about what she suffered the subtlety and the brutality of her ordeal as if she were one of my own heroines. God forbid that I should ever think of Mary Bradford as " material " : that I should analyze her, or dramatize her, or look at her with the artist's squint. If I tell her story, it is because I think it right that we should know what things can be. For the most part, we keep to our own conti nents : the cruel nations are the insensitive nations, and the squeamish races are kind. But Mary Bradford was the finest flower of New England ; ten home-keeping generations only lay between her and the Quest of 1620. It is chronic hyperassthesia simply to be New English ; and the pure-bred New Englander had best stick to the euphemisms, the ap proximations, the reticences, of his own extraordinary village. But Mary Bradford VAIN OBLATIONS encountered all the physical realities of life in their crudest form, alone, in the obscene heart of Africa, with black faces thrust always between her and the sky. Some cynic may put in his belittling word to the effect that the New Englander has always counted physical suffering less than spiritual dis comfort. The mental torture was not lacking in Mary Bradford's case. For over a year, the temptation to suicide must have been like a terrible thirst, death any death luring her like a rippling spring. I told Saxe one night in mid-Atlantic, to comfort him, that she would of course have killed herself if she saw no chance of escape. Saxe laughed dryly. " That's the most damnable thing about it," he said. " Mary would think it mortal sin to kill herself. She would stick on as long as God chose to keep the breath in her body." " Sin ? " I queried rather stupidly. " Yes, sin," he answered. " You don't know anything about it : you were brought up in Europe." " But, Saxe," I cried, " rather than" I did not finish. " You don't know anything about New 3 VAIN OBLATIONS England," he said. " Damn your books ! Missionaries face everything, and there's more than one kind of martyrdom. I hope she's dead. I rather think she is." His voice was uneven, but with a meaning less unevenness like a boy's that is changing. There was no emotion in it. A week more of monotonous ploughing of the waves would just have broken him, I think ; but he pulled himself together when he touched the soil of Africa. Something in him went out to meet the curse that hung low over the land in the tropic afternoon ; and encountering the An tagonist, his eyes grew sane again. But with sanity came the reticence of battle. All that I know of Saxe's and Mary Bradford's early lives, I learned in those four weeks. I have made out some things about her, since then, that probably Saxe never knew. As I said, I have been thinking about Mary Bradford for three years, and it is no secret that to contem plate is, in the end, to know. The stigmata received by certain saints are, I take it, irrefu table proof of this. I do not pretend to carry upon me Mary Bradford's wounds ; I do not even canonize her in my heart. But I seriously believe that she had, on the whole, 4 VAIN OBLATIONS the most bitter single experience ever under gone by woman ; and much of the extra ordinary horror of the adventure came from the very exquisiteness of the victim. I have often wondered if the Greek and Italian literatures that she knew so well offered her any mitigating memory of a woman more luckless than she. Except Jocasta, I positively cannot think of one ; and Jocasta never lived. All of us have dreams of a market where we could sell our old lamps for new. How must not Mary Bradford have longed to change her humanities against mere foothold on the soil of America or Europe ! But my preface is too long. Now and then there is a story where all things work together for evil to the people involved ; and these stories have, even for their protagonists, a horrible fascination. The story of Saxe and Mary Bradford is of this nature : a case, as it were, of double chicane. Everything happened precisely wrong. Almost anything happening differ ently would have given them a chance. If Mary Bradford had been born in Virginia, if her eyes had been blue instead of brown, if Ngawa had come back three hours sooner 5 VAIN OBLATIONS Maupassant would have told it all from that point of view. But I am not trying to make literature out of it : it is as history that this story is important to me. Saxe had been engaged to Mary Bradford since her last year in college. Her mother had died when Mary was born, and the Reverend James Bradford had sailed, after his wife's death, for this little West African Mission, leaving his child with a sister. Mary was brought up in America. When she was ten, her father came home for a year, and took her back with him ; but at twelve she was sent definitely home to be educated. James Bradford could not have conceived of depriving his child of Greek and trigonometry, and from school Mary went to college. She never, at any time, had any inclination to enter upon missionary work, though her religious faith was never at any moment in the smallest degree shaken. From her thirteenth year she had been an active and enthusiastic member of her father's denomina tion. She was a bit of a blue-stocking and occasionally somewhat ironic in speech. When I asked Saxe " if she had no faults," these were all he could think of. When she became engaged to Saxe, she stipulated that 6 VAIN OBLATIONS she should spend two winters with her father before marrying. The separation had never really parted Mary and her father ; they had never lost the habit of each other. You see those sympathies sometimes between father and daughter : inarticulate, usually, like the speech of rock to rock, but absolutely inde structible. There was no question I wish to emphasize this about her love for Saxe. I had, for a time, her letters. It was a grande passion to use the unhallowed historic phrase ; twenty love stories of old Louisiana could have been melted up into it. Saxe, of course, consented to her going. During the second spring he was to go out, her father was to marry them at the Mission, and they were to return to America after a honeymoon in Italy. There is not one detail that does not, in the end, deepen the irony of it, if you look at it all long enough. Italy ! All that romantic shimmer and tinkle against the savage fact that was. She went, and for six months seems to have busied herself happily enough with good little Mrs. Price at the Mission. She picked up a few dialects she was always remarkably clever at languages. The Mission hangs above a tiny seaport if 7 VAIN OBLATIONS you can call it a seaport, for there is a great reef a few miles out, and the infrequent steam ships stop outside that and send passengers and letters in by boat. It is not one of the regular ports of call, and its chief significance lies in its position at the mouth of a largish river that winds inland for a few hundred miles, finishing no one knows exactly where. The natives for a hundred miles up-stream are fairly friendly and come down sometimes in big boats to trade ; beyond that, the country runs into jungle and forest, and grows nastier and nastier. No one knows precisely about that region, and it lies just outside every one's sphere of influence ; but there seems to be a network of unhealthy trails, a constant intertribal warfare, and an occasional raid by the precocious pupil of an Arab slave-trader. It is too far south for the big caravans, of course, but there is undoubtedly slave-stealing though it is extremely difficult to learn anything definite about the country, as there are a dozen different tribes speaking entirely different languages, and each lying tortuously about all the rest. This is all that Saxe could tell me about that hinterland which he had never expected to be interested in. 8 VAIN OBLATIONS In March, after Mary reached the Mission (she sailed in July, immediately after gradua tion), the chief of a small tribe some hundred miles up-stream descended in pomp to barter ivory for such treasure as oozes from European ships. Having seldom condescended to trade, he was disappointed at receiving so little for his ivory a scanty lot of female tusks and sought distraction and consolation within ear shot of the Mission piano. He took especially kindly to the Reverend James Bradford, gravely inspected the school, and issued an invitation for Mr. Bradford to come up stream and Christianize his tribe. The Mission had worked up and down the coast, as it could, but had never worked inland more rumours than boats came down the waterway, which was not really a highroad and certainly led to nothing good. They lacked money for such an enterprise, and workers ; but, being missionaries, never forgot that the river, and all who dwelt on its banks, belonged to God. It did not occur to James Bradford to refuse the call, which he took quite simply, as from brother to brother; it did not occur to Mary Bradford to let him go alone, or to her father to protest against her 9 VAIN OBLATIONS accompanying him. The patriarchal tinge is still perceptible in the New English conception of the family. Let me say, here, that there is no evidence that Ngawa himself ever broke faith with his white proteges. He was, like them, a victim of circumstances. They were to go for six months. That would bring them to September. In Septem ber, three new workers were to come out to the Mission, and James Bradford hoped that two could then be permanently spared for the new Mission up-stream, which he already foresaw and yearned over. In September, he and Mary would return to the port ; in late April, Saxe was coming out to marry Mary. They departed under the escort of Ngawa himself. Mr. Price promised to get a boat up to them in May, or at least a runner with letters. Such details of the final catastrophe as Saxe was acquainted with were brought to the Mission by a native boy in September, just before the boat was to start up-stream (taking Adams and Jenks, the new recruits) to bring the Bradfords down. All reports had hitherto been favourable, if not astonishingly so. Ngawa had listened, and his heart seemed to incline 10 VAIN OBLATIONS to Mr. Bradford's teachings. Mary had started a little school for the babies. But Ngawa had no intention of compelling his people to embrace Christianity : he simply courteously permitted it to exist in his dominion. As talk of war came on, he was pre-occupied with the affairs of his thatched state. The populace they seem to have been a gentle crowd enough grew apathetic to their apostles and deposited the commanded tribute somewhat listlessly before their huts. The medicine-men, of course, were hostile from the first, and, as the war drums beat in the forest and the men of the village gathered to sharpen their tufted spears, wild talk had undoubtedly not been wanting. The end had really been a bitter accident. Ngawa ab sented himself for three days to do some last exhorting and recruiting in his other villages. The attack that had not been expected for a week, at least, was made a few hours before his return. It became a raid rather than a battle ; the village resisted the siege only a short time, and the invaders did what they would in the monstrous tropic dusk. Many of the native women were stabbed quickly ; but the youngest ones, and Mary Bradford, ii were dragged off as captives. Mr. Bradford was killed in the beginning not by the enemy, who were busy despatching Ngawa's subjects, but by Ngawa's chief medicine-man, who stole out of the shadows, slit his throat twice across, caught the blood in a cup, and then slid back into the darkness. The boy who brought them the story averred that he had seen it all, having been present, though somehow left out of the melee. The enemy, afraid of Ngawa's return, did not stop for the half-grown children. The white girl tore away, the boy said, and started back to her father, but the warrior who held her hit her on the head, so that she dropped, and then carried her off. Oh yes, he had seen it all quite well : he had climbed into a tree. The huts were all burning, and it was lighter than day. Ngawa came back that night, and, later, they destroyed utterly the villages of the other tribe, but they got back no captives. These had been killed at once, probably, or sold. Ngawa had gone back to the medicine-men. Ngawa's people must have been gentler than most of their colour, for the boy answered all the questions of the stricken missionaries before he asked to hear the piano. 12 VAIN OBLATIONS This was absolutely all that Saxe knew, when he stumbled into my rooms and asked me to go out to Africa with him. The first cablegrams had simply announced the mas sacre, and it was only on receipt of letters from the Prices that Saxe learned about Mary and her horrible, shadowy chance of life. The Prices promised to cable any news, but it was unlikely that they would have any more. The boy who had brought them this story drifted down the coast, and for some months few boats came down the stream. Ngawa, they heard vaguely, had died, and his son reigned in his stead, a bitter disciple of un clean rites. Young Adams, in the pity of his heart, had gone the hundred miles to the village, but the people had evidently nothing to tell. The white priest was dead, and the white girl was gone. Their own captives were gone, too, and if they had been able to recover them would they not have done it ? Undoubtedly they were killed, but their enemies had been punished. No : they were faithful to their own gods. What had the white god done for his priest, or for Ngawa, who had listened and died ? Doubtless Adams would have been killed, if they had VAIN OBLATIONS been defeated in the war, but he profited by the magnanimity of triumph. It was astonish ing how little impression, except on Ngawa and one old medicine-man, James Bradford had made. Save that he had achieved martyrdom for himself, he might as well have stayed peacefully at the Mission. It is all, from first to last, a story of vain oblations. The people were inclined to forget that he had ever been there, but they registered their opinion that his white brother had better go back at once. Saxe's face, as Adams gave him his last news, was tense. He gripped the hand of the one white man who had visited that bitter scene, as if he would never let it go. If Saxe had been delayed in America, it was only in order to arrange his affairs so that he could stay away indefinitely. He intended to follow Mary Bradford down those dim and bloody trails until at least he should have seen some witness of her death. Saxe was not rich, and his arrangements took him a certain length of time. We sailed from New York in March, and caught the African liner at Plymouth. I will not enter upon the details of Saxe's 14 VAIN OBLATIONS activity during the next months, nor of the results he gained. It was a case where govern ments were of no use : the jungle that had swallowed up Mary Bradford acknowledged no suzerain across the seas. Saxe visited Ngawa's village, of course " I am steel proof," he said, and I think he believed it. The story of those months is a senseless story of perishing lights and clues of twisted sand. We spent three months in rescuing the yellow widow of a Portuguese pearl-fisher, who had been captured by coast pirates and sold inland. When Saxe stood face to face with the " white woman " he had worked blindly to deliver, he reeled before her. " Tell him that I will marry him," said the woman with a noble gesture. She was forty, fat, and hideous. I mention the incident which turned me quite sick, and in which, to this day, I can see nothing more humorous simply to show the maddening nature of our task. Even I had believed that this mysterious white woman was Mary Bradford. In that land of rumour and superstition and ignorance and cunning above all, of savage indifference anything might be true, and anything might be false. Three days after we had started off to find the 15 VAIN OBLATIONS Portuguese hag, a real clue came into the Mission. Our three months had been quite lost, for the Prices could get no word to us on our knight-errant task. Poor Saxe ! In September, Saxe, following this clue, which seemed to bear some real relation to the events of the year before, travelled solemnly, accompanied by a few natives only, into the heart of that hinterland which stood, to all the coast above and below the Mission, for treachery, mystery, and death. In October, he reached the village of the chief in question a sun-smitten kraal, caught between high blue mountains and the nasty bit of jungle that separated them from one of the big waterways of Africa. Politics are largely a matter of geography, and his position was one of enviable independence, though he was to neighbouring kings on the scale of Andorra to France and Spain. He was a greedy old man, and the sight of several pounds of beads made him very communicative. Half of his in formation was bound, by African code, to be false, and Saxe had no means of knowing which half ; but he owned to having purchased, a few months before, from a wandering trader, a slave woman of white 16 VAIN OBLATIONS blood. She had come high, he affirmed, cocking his eye at Saxe. But she was not Saxe's slave Saxe had put it in that way in order to be remotely intelligible to the savage mind. Oh, no ! she was the daughter of a Mandingo woman and an Arab. The trader had told him that : he had known the mother. Oh, no ! it could not be Saxe's slave. How ever, he was willing, for a really good price, to consider selling her. Saxe refused to be discouraged. The clue had seemed to him trustworthy ; and the story about the Man- dingo woman might be pure invention- bravado, to raise the price. He asked to see her. Oh, certainly; before purchasing he should see her. But meanwhile there was the official cheer to taste kava, above all, inimitably mixed and she should be fetched. Where was she ? A young slave girl suggested sardonically that she was prob ably at her toilet. Since she had heard of the white man's coming Saxe had tactfully sent a runner ahead of him- she had been smearing herself meticulously with ochre and other precious pigments. This was said with a side long glance at the chief : obviously, he distributed those precious pigments only to his c 17 VAIN OBLATIONS favourites. Saxe said that from that moment his heart misgave him. He had been somehow sure that this woman was Mary. Why his heart should have misgiven him, I do not know ; or what devil of stupidity put it into his head that this was the trick of a half-breed slave to make herself irresistible to a white man. It sounded to him, he said, like the inspiration that would naturally occur to the daughter of an Arab by a Mandingo woman. It has never sounded to me in the least like that. He said that he still believed it was Mary ; but I fancy he believed it after the fashion of the doubter who shouts his creed a little louder. Of course there was something pre posterous in the idea of Mary Bradford's making herself barbarically chic with ochre to greet the lover who might be coming to rescue her. But was not the whole thing pre posterous to the point of incredibility ? And Mary Bradford was not an ordinary woman not the yellow widow of a Portuguese pearl- fisher. It has always seemed to me that poor Saxe ought to have realized that. Saxe consumed kava until he could consume no more. Then the slave girl announced that the woman had been found. Saxe rose to his 18 VAIN OBLATIONS feet. He was stifling in the great hut, where all the chief councillors had joined them at their feast, where the reek from greased bodies seemed to mount visibly into the twilight of the great conical roof. His head was reeling, and his heart was beating weakly, crazily, against his ribs " as if it wanted to come out," he said. His hands were ice-cold. He had just presence of mind enough to drag the black interpreter out with him, and to leave one of his own men inside to watch the stuff with which he proposed to pay. The chief and most of his councillors remained within. Outside the hut, her back to the setting sun, stood the woman. Saxe had of course known that Mary would be dressed like a native ; but this figure staggered him. She was half naked, after the fashion of the tribe, a long petticoat being her only garment. Undoubtedly her skin had been originally fair, Saxe said ; but it was tanned to a deep brown virtually bronzed. For that matter, there was hardly an inch of her that was not tattooed or painted. Some great design, crudely smeared in with thick strokes of ochre, covered her throat, shoulders, and breast. Over it were hung rows and rows of shells, the longest rows 19 VAIN OBLATIONS reaching to the top of the petticoat. Her face was oddly marred uncivilized, you might say by a large nose-ring, and a metal disc that was set in the lower lip, distending it. Forehead and cheeks were streaked with paint, and her straight black hair was dressed after the tribal fashion : stiffened with grease, braided with shells, puffed out with wooden rolls to enormous size. Her eyelids were painted red. That was not a habit of the tribe, and might point to an Arab tradition. The painted eyelids and the streaks that seemed to elongate the eyes themselves were Saxe's despair he had counted on meeting the eyes of Mary Bradford. To his consternation, the woman stood absolutely silent, her eyes bent on the ground, her face in shadow. Even Saxe, who had no psychology, seems to have seen that Mary Bradford would, in that plight if it was she wait for him to speak first. But I think he had expected her at least to faint. Saxe looked at her long without speak ing. He was trying, he said, to penetrate her detestable disguise, to find some vulnerable point where he could strike at her very heart, and know. In the midst of his bewilderment, he grew cool cold, even. He gave himself 20 VAIN OBLATIONS orders (he told me afterward) as a general might send them from the rear. His tongue, his hands, his feet were very far off, but they obeyed punctiliously. My own opinion is that Saxe never, from the moment when he saw the woman, believed it to be Mary. Her back, as I have said, was against the light. As the purchaser of a slave he might well wish to see her more fully revealed. He gave the order through the interpreter : " Turn to the light." As she turned obedi ently and stood in profile against the scarlet west, he saw that her form was unshapely. On her back were a few scars, long since healed. That moment was undoubtedly Hell for Saxe, in spite of the doubt upon him. But what must it have been for the impassible creature before him ? Saxe saw that he must play the game alone. " Mary," he said quietly in English, " I have come to take you home." In the circumstances it was the stupidest thing he could have said ; but the only thing he thought of was speaking in English. If it was Mary, these words, he thought, would reach her, would dispel her shame, or, if she were mad, pierce her madness. 21 VAIN OBLATIONS She seemed not to have heard. " Bid her look me in the face," he said brutally to the interpreter. The order was repeated. She turned, raised her painted eyelids, and looked him straight in the eyes, with the apathetic look of the slave, the world over. " But were they Mary Bradford's eyes ? " I cried to him, when he told me. " I don't know, damn you ! " he said. " Mary had never looked at me like that as if she didn't see me, and painted like a devil." He seems to have felt as far as I can define his feeling that she was not Mary, but that perhaps he could bully her into being Mary. I do not know how else to explain his unconvinced but perfectly dogged insistence on her identity. He had, of course, been greatly shaken by the extraordinary appearance of the woman. Perhaps he was simply afraid it was she because it would be so terrible if it were, and was resolved not to shirk. Saxe, too, was a New Englander. At all events, he shouted his creed a little louder still. " You are treating me very badly, Mary. I am going in to buy you from the chief; and then you will listen to me." The woman heard Saxe's voice and looked 22 VAIN OBLATIONS at the interpreter. Saxe, stupefied, repeated his speech to the negro, and the latter trans lated. At this, she threw up her arms and broke into guttural ejaculations. That painted form swayed grotesquely from side to side, Saxe said, and she tore the shells out of her hair, tearing the hair with them. Giving him one glance of devilish hatred, she ran to the chief's hut. Saxe followed. There was nothing else to do. Then began, Saxe said, what for him was a horrible pantomime. He heard nothing of what was said, until afterward, for the inter preter could not keep up with the prestissimo of that scene ; but one understood it without knowing. The woman grovelled at the chief's feet ; she pointed to Saxe and wrung her hands. She was not Saxe's slave, and evi dently did not wish to be. The other women drew near to listen, being, clearly, personally interested in the outcome. The chief was, as I have said, avaricious. He looked longingly at the shining heaps of beads, the bolts of scarlet cloth, above all, the Remington rifles. Yet it was clear that he had not wholly out grown his sluggish penchant for the woman who clung to him. It does not often happen, VAIN OBLATIONS for that matter, that a petty chief in the remote interior can count a white woman even a half-breed among his slaves ; and the male savage has an instinct for mating above him. The woman saw whither the avaricious eye wandered. She rose from the ground, she stood between him and the treasures, she bent over him and murmured to him, she pointed to her own distorted form. . . . The little slave girl scowled, and the chief's eye gleamed. What at first had seemed a possible detriment, now showed as an advantage. " That was true," he exclaimed. " Before long she would bring him a warrior son or a girl he could sell for many cows. Let the white man wait." Saxe stamped his foot. Not one day would he wait : the bargain should be completed then. He told me afterward that, after seeing her with the chief, he was absolutely con vinced that the woman they were cheapening was the half-breed Arab they said she was ; and the general in the rear of the battle wondered dully what he should do with her. But the woman had thrust herself cunningly beneath the chiefs very feet, had twined her arms about his ankles, had welded herself to him like a footstool that he could not shake 24 VAIN OBLATIONS off. Over the chief's thick features, in the torch light (for night was falling outside), into his avaricious eyes, crept a swinish gleam. Let the white man wait until to-morrow. Night was falling ; it was time to sleep. By the sunlight they could deal better. The woman panted heavily beneath his feet, never loosing her hold. The young slave girl looked down at her with unconcealed malignity. Saxe found himself forced to retire from the royal hut sleeping-chamber, banqueting-hall, audience-room in one. He said that all he thought of, as he stumbled out, was the idiotic figure he should make at the Mission as the owner of an Arab-Mandingo woman. It was worse than the yellow Portuguese. He was conducted to his tent. The inter preter confirmed there all that Saxe had divined. Let it be said now that Saxe had one clear inspiration. Before leaving the hut he had turned and spoken to the woman who was fawning on the wretched negro. " Mary," he said, " if you ask me to, I will shoot you straight through the heart/' The woman had snarled unintelligibly at the sound of his voice, and had redoubled her caresses. Can you blame Saxe for having doubted ? Remember 25 VAIN OBLATIONS that she had not for one moment given any sign of being Mary Bradford ; -remember that he had no proof that it was Mary Bradford. " Had you no intuition of her ? " asked young Adams, later, at the Mission. " Intuition ! " cried Saxe. " There wasn't a feature of Mary Bradford there : she was a loathsome horror." Let those who cannot believe in Saxe's failure to recognize her, reflect for an instant on all that is contained in that literal statement. Have you never failed, after a few years of separation, to recognize some one : some one whose face had not been subjected to barbaric decoration and disfigurement, not even to three years of the African sun ; who, living all the while in the same quiet street, had merely passed for a time under the skilful transforming hands of sorrow ? I have seen Mary Brad ford's photograph, and was told at the same time that the not very striking face depended for its individuality on the expression of eyes and mouth. But painted eyes . . . and a lip- ring ? She was undoubtedly, as Saxe said, " a loathsome horror " ; and a loathsome horror who gave no sign. I firmly believe that she was not recognizable to the eye. Saxe's only chance would have lain in divination ; in 26 VAIN OBLATIONS being able to say unerringly of the woman he loved : " Thus, or thus, in given circum stances, would she behave." Such knowledge of Mary Bradford could never have been easy to any man. In my opinion, no one can blame him for doubting. The magnificence of the performance was almost outside the realm of possibility. I asked Saxe once if Mary Bradford had been good at acting. He had never seen her do but one part : she had done that extremely well. And the part ? Beatrice, in Much Ado. Beatrice ! The strain of it had told on Saxe, and he slept that night. But it is only fair to say that, before he slept, he had quite made up his mind that he was as far away from Mary Bradford as he had ever been. It is not to be wondered at. Only a man who had grasped Mary Bradford's idea it has taken me three years to do that, entirely could have believed that she would let Saxe go out baffled from the hut in which she deliberately chose to stay with her half-drunk, wholly vile captor. Women who could have done all the rest, would have turned at Saxe's offer of a kindly shot through the heart. But Mary Bradford was great. She was also infinitely wronged by 27 VAIN OBLATIONS Fate. It is all wanton, wanton to the very last : all, that is, except her own part, which was sublimely reasoned. Saxe slept, I say ; and at dawn woke to his problem. The intelligence that works for us while we sleep waked him into the conviction that he must, at any cost, buy the woman. He said that, as he strode over to the chief's hut, he was thinking only of what price he ought to put on the child that would be such a fantastic mixture of breeds. He did not want the woman, but he felt that the purchase was inevitable. This, I am convinced, was only the New English leaven working him up to martyrdom. It would be unmitigatedly dreadful to have the woman on his hands, and therefore he ought probably to buy her. The chief greeted him with temper, and soon Saxe learned why. The woman had left the hut before dawn, taking with her her master's largest knife. She was found later in her own little hovel, dead, with a clean stab to her heart. Suicide is virtually unknown among savages, and the village was astir. Saxe asked to see the body at once, but that, it seems, was not etiquette : he had to wait until it was prepared for burial. For an in- 28 VAIN OBLATIONS stant, he said, he thought of bargaining for the body, but forebore. He had a difficult return journey to make, and the point was, after all, to see it. When they permitted him to enter the hut, the face had been piously disfigured beyond recognition. He told me that he lifted the tattooed hand and kissed it : he did not know why. It was clear that if the woman had preposterously been Mary, she would not have wished it ; and if she were the other, it was almost indecent. But he could not help it. This impulse of his seems to have been his only recognition of Mary Bradford. In life and in death, she suppressed every sign of herself with consum mate art. We were a fevered group that waited for Saxe day after day at the Mission ; and he seemed to have been gone an intolerably long time. The broken leg that had kept me from going with him was almost well when he returned. Yet he had taken the shortest way back. It was also the unhealthiest. He said that he had heard war rumours that made him avoid the more frequented trail, but I fancy he rather hoped that the swamps he clung to would give him fever. In that 29 VAIN OBLATIONS sense and in that sense only Saxe could perhaps be said to have committed suicide. He stumbled into the Mission dining-room at noon one day. " And Mary ? " we all cried, rising. " Oh, did you expect to see Mary ? " he asked politely, but with evident astonish ment. We got him to bed at once. After the days of delirium were over, he told his story quite simply. It was pitifully short. The concrete facts seemed to be perfectly clear in his mind, and he gave them spontaneously ; but what he himself had felt during that dramatic hour, I learned only by close questioning. He died suddenly, when he was apparently convalescent. The year he had been through had simply killed resiliency in him and he went down at the last as stupidly as a ninepin. I cannot imagine the source of the rumour that he had killed himself, unless it was some person who thought he ought to have done so. He started, at the end, to speak to me : " If Mary ever " He never got beyond the three words ; they showed sufficiently, however, that he was considering the possibility of Mary Bradford's being dis covered after his death. He may have been 30 VAIN OBLATIONS wandering a little at the last ; but, in my opinion, Saxe had never believed, even after the suicide, that the woman he had seen had been his betrothed. Some weeks after Saxe's death, we received incontrovertible proof if testimony is ever incontrovertible that it had indeed been she. We had been surrounded for a year by a hideous jungle blind, hostile, impenetrable. Now out of that jungle stalked a simple fact. One of the native girls who had been taken captive with Mary Bradford returned at length to her own tribe. She had shared Mary's fortunes, as it happened, almost to the last ; then the chief who had bought them both sold her, and by the successful chances of purchase, raid, and battle she had reached her own people. It was hardly more than crawling home to die ; but she managed to send word by one of her kinsmen to the white people down the river. Apparently she and Mary had promised each other to report if either should ever reach friends again. Her message was pitifully meagre : Mary had talked little in those wild months ; and after she had seen that they were too well watched to escape, she had talked not at all. But the two had evidently VAIN OBLATIONS clung together an extraordinary tie, which was the last Mary Bradford was to know of friendship. The burden of the native's report was that the white girl was the favourite of a chief who gave her much finery. The dying woman seems to have thought it would set Mary Bradford's friends at rest her kins man, I remember, said that he had good news for us. The news was no news to me I had been thinking ; but I was glad that Saxe had died before he could hear it. Even the comfort of knowing that Mary was surely dead would never have made up to him for the ironic memory of the last hour he had spent with her. Besides, Saxe would never have understood. I should probably never have touched this chapter of history with a public pen, if I had not heard a woman say, a few months since, that she thought Mary Bradford's conduct indelicate. Had the woman not said it to me directly, I should not have believed, even at my cynical age, that such a thing could be said. I greatly regret, myself, that the facts were ever told : they should have been buried in Africa with Saxe. But the Prices returned to America not long after it all happened, and 32 VAIN OBLATIONS apparently could not refrain from talking. Even so, I should have let Mary Bradford's legend alone, for ever, had I not learned that she could be misjudged. Consider dispassionately the elements of her situation ; and tell me who has ever been so tortured. Physically unable to escape by flight, morally incapable, as you might say, of escaping by death for there can be no doubt that, difficult as suicide would have been to a guarded captive, she could have found some poisonous root, courted the bite of some serpent, snatched for one instant some pointed weapon ; and that she was deterred, as Saxe said, by the simple belief that to take one's life was the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost, the Comforter she could but take what came. As a high-priced chattel, she was probably not, for the most part, ill-treated save for the tattooing, which was not cruelly intended. The few scars that Saxe noted doubtless bore witness to her protest against the utmost bitterness of slavery, some sudden saint-like frenzy with which she opposed pro fanation. She may have wondered why God chose so to degrade her : her conduct with Saxe shows beyond a doubt how she rated her D 33 VAIN OBLATIONS degradation. She made not one attempt to dignify or to defend her afflicted body. Her soul despised it : trampled it under foot. What Mary Bradford suffered before Saxe came we cannot know, but the measure of it lies, I think, in the resolution she took (if we believe the jealous slave girl) when she heard of the white man's approach. She must have divined Saxe, leagues away, as he was unable to divine her, face to her. Her one intent was to deceive him, to steep herself in un recognizable savagery. If Mary Bradford had conceived of any role possible for herself in her own world, she would not have created her great part. If she had felt herself fit even to care for lepers at Molokai, she would have washed away her paint and fallen at his feet. It is perfectly evident that she considered herself fit for nothing in life hardly for death. Her hope was clearly that Saxe should not know her. I do not believe that it was pride. If there had been any pride left in Mary Brad ford's heart, she could not have stood quietly (" apathetically," was his word !) before Saxe in the flare of the dying sun. It was not to save anything of hers that she went through her comedy, but only to save a little merciful 34 VAIN OBLATIONS blindness for Saxe himself. He undoubtedly made it as hard as possible for her. I am inclined to think that if he had gone away at once, she would be living still mothering her half-breed child, teaching it secretly the fear of God. When she saw that all Saxe's be wilderment still left him with the firm determination to buy her to take her away and study her at his leisure she conceived her magnificent chute de rideau. When she went into the hut, she had decided, for Saxe's sake, to die. Mary Bradford grovelling at the feet of the drunken chief will always seem to me one of the most remarkable figures in history : I should never have mentioned Jocasta in the same breath with her. Only Christianity can give us tragedy like that. How must she not have longed, at Saxe's offer of a kindly shot through the heart, to turn, to fling herself at his feet, to cry out his name, once. She " redoubled her caresses," Saxe said ! Has any man ever been so loved, do you think ? For the sake of bestowing upon him that healing doubt, she let him go, she put ofF death, she spent her last night on earth not fifty yards from him, in the hut of a savage, that she might have, before dawn, the 35 VAIN OBLATIONS means of committing the unpardonable sin. Note that she did not commit suicide until she had made it perfectly plausible from the point of view of the Arab-Mandingo woman. She proved to him that it was not she. She gauged Saxe perfectly. Nothing but some such evidence as later we received perhaps not even that would ever have made Saxe believe that Mary Bradford, with him by her side, had clung to that vile savage. Even Mary Bradford whose soul must have been, by that time, far away from her body, a mere voice in her own ears, a remote counsellor to hands and feet could not have done that, had she not intended to die. But remember that up to that day she had lived rather than rank herself with the " violenti contro se stessi." 'We can simply say that Mary Brad ford chose the chance of Hell for the sake of sparing Saxe pain. The fact that you or I I pass over the lady who thinks her in delicate ; does she think, I wonder, that it would have been delicate for Mary Bradford to accompany Saxe back to civilization ? may believe her to be one of the saints, has nothing to do with what she thought. Mary Bradford came of a race that for many 36 VAIN OBLATIONS generations believed in predestination ; but she herself believed in free will. Dreadful as it is to be foredamned, it is worse to have damned yourself. She had not even the cold comfort of Calvinism. I said that I under stood Mary Bradford. I am not sure that it would not have taken a Spanish saint of the sixteenth century really to understand her. Sixteenth-century Spain is the only thing I know of that is in the least like New England. I am not trying to make out a " case " for Mary Bradford ; and I sincerely hope that the lady who thinks her indelicate will never read these pages. For most people, the facts will suffice, and I have no desire to interpret them for the others. You have only to meditate for a little on the ironic and tragic reflections of a hundred kinds that must have surged through Mary Bradford's brain, to be swept away, yourself, on the horrid current. Do I need, for example, to point out the difficulty to use a word that I think the lady I have cited would approve of merely meeting the man she adored, face to face ? For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement. No, you have only to 37 VAIN OBLATIONS explore Mary Bradford's tragedy for yourself. It will take you three years, perhaps, as it has taken me, to penetrate the last recesses. And if you are tempted for a moment to think of her as mad, or exaltee, reflect on how com pletely she understood Saxe. I am only half a New Englander ; and I confess that, though I reverence her heroism, I am even more humble before her intelligence. It is no blame to Saxe that he stumbled out of the chiefs hut, completely her dupe. Poor Saxe ! But the vivid vision of that scene leaves Phedre tasteless to me. As I say, I am only half a New Englander. . . . THE MANGO-SEED THE two young men looked at each other rather helplessly. Then "Marty" Martin drew a few ragged words over his helplessness. " I'm sorry, Peter really, awfully. I'll be back in an hour. And do buck up. But you have bucked up, you really have. You look ever so much better than you did when we went to lunch. And I'll be back. Oh, you can depend on me." He drifted off through the door. His muscles were tense with haste, but he fingered chairs and tables as he went as if trying to put clogs of decency on feet indecorously winged. Even so, he was soon out of sight, and Peter Wayne was alone. " There's no point in saying it isn't rum, because it is," he murmured to himself. " And here" he added, looking about. There was no moral support in those crimson walls, those great pier-glasses, those insignificant writing-tables with red-shaded electric lights, 39 THE MANGO-SEED those uncomfortable tapestried armchairs. It wasn't the setting to help you through a crisis. He was in the quietest corner of the most essentially respectable hotel in New York. There were plenty of them scores that were incidentally respectable ; but at the St. Justin respectability had been cherished through years for its own sake, as more important than the register, the cuisine, or the unimpeachable location that no metropolitan progress could render inconvenient. As a very young bachelor with virtually no family ties, he was not familiar with the St. Justin. It wasn't a place where you would expect to get the kind of thing his kind of human being wanted. He couldn't, for example, have induced Marty to lunch there. They had lunched at Plon's. It was an hotel where you might be perfectly sure your grandparents had stopped. It was natural that his mother should have selected it for their meeting, as she hadn't been in America for well over twenty years. But there was less backing than he had expected, somehow. Sitting uncomfortably in one of the corners by a writing-table (his back to the window so that the familiar streets shouldn't lure him too 40 THE MANGO-SEED much to flight), he took the privilege of the consciously crucial moment. He reviewed his life. It was so very short, after all, that it was easily reviewed. He was only a few months out of the university, and he was just twenty-two. The insoluble was there to the point of being either romantic or absurd, he didn't know which. He had what so many young people long for in vain, a mystery. He had amused himself occasionally with monstrous hypotheses. But what real account could he give of himself ? What account, that is, of the sort that Marty Martin and his like had by heart before they could spell ? The most that he knew about his parents except that they were alive and in the tropics was that they banked in Honolulu and had some natural hold or other on Marty Martin's uncle. Marty Martin's uncle had picked out Peter's school and his college for him, and was telegraphed for when Peter had appendicitis. That was as near the parental relation as anything he had known from experience. Lonely ? Well, any fellow was lonely when the other fellows all went trooping home for holidays ; but loneliness he had always frankly diagnosed as three-quarters THE MANGO-SEED pride. The fellows were always glad to get back to school or college, he noticed. In any case, he had stopped thinking about it much his plight. That saved his dignity. What he sat now vaguely dreading was the immense, the cataclysmic downfall of his dignity. He tried to put the facts to himself so simply that they should be as reassuring as a primer. Ollendorf, he had once complained to a teacher, would take the zest out of a murder, the sense out of a scandal. Tragedy was a verbal matter. Put a crime into any foreign language, and it sounded like a laundry list. He would try, as it were, to find the French for his situation. " Oh, rot ! " he began, taking his own ad vice quite seriously. " It isn't so Sudermannish as all that. My father and my mother chose to go to the tropics to live, a year after I was born. They did not take me with them. They have never sent for me ; but they have supported me ; they have written to me occasionally ; they have got Marty Martin's uncle to keep me out of the hands of the S.P.C.C., and trained me generally to do without them. I've never been invited to go to Tahiti. And Tahiti isn't like London if 42 THE MANGO-SEED you know any one there, you can't go without an invitation. They can't have turned against me, when I was eleven months old, on account of my vices. I've kept pretty jolly and managed to regularize the situation with my friends. Now my mother has written that she's coming to America to see me. Indeed, she has actually come. I wasn't allowed to meet her at a steamer, decently. I have to meet her here here." (He looked gloomily around at the conventional walls.) " Yet she doesn't seem to be staying here. I don't know whether she will want tea, or where to take her to dinner. I don't know her when I see her. I don't know oh, hang it, I don't know anything ! And if I could funk it, like Marty, I would. But what can you do when a lady takes the trouble to bring you into the world ? If it had been my father, now, I wouldn't I positively wouldn't have con sented to meet him. It's it's no way to treat a fellow." His vain attempt at Ollendorfian flatness broke down : the mere facts seemed so very much against him. He had often complained to Marty Martin that it was dashed awkward, this being the only original changeling; but, 43 THE MANGO-SEED in point of fact, he had never been so uncom fortable in his life as now, at the prospect of playing the authentic filial role. " I'll make her dine here," he muttered. He could think of nothing worse without being actually dis respectful. An old lady in a gray shawl walked slowly down the hall past the door, and it suddenly struck him that his mother would perhaps like to dine at the St. Justin. " I ought to have cabled to ask what colour her shawl would be," he began, in a flippant whisper, to himself. The flippant whisper stopped. He was much too genuinely nervous to be flippant any longer without an audience. At the same time, he found himself wonder ing oh, insincerely, theatrically, rhetorically wondering why he had not bought an etiquette book. There was something well, to be honest, something like an extra gland in his throat, something like a knot in his healthy young nerves that kept him from putting the question to himself audibly. " If she cries " he reflected, with anticipatory vindictiveness. What he really meant was : " If she makes me so much as sniff." For your mother was really the one person in the world who had you necessarily at a disadvantage. Even if 44 THE MANGO-SEED you hadn't the habit of her, you couldn't count on yourself for reticence. You might be as bored as possible, but that wouldn't save you. There might be treacheries of the flesh, disloyalties of the cuticle all manner of reversions to embryonic helplessness. She somehow had your nerves, your physical equi librium, at her mercy. Old Stein, prodding at you with instruments in the psychological laboratory, was a mere joke in comparison. Even the most deceived, the most docile and voluble student ended respectably in a card catalogue. Peter felt suddenly an immense tenderness for the decencies, the unrealities of " science." But to meet your mother in con ditions like these was the real thing : the naked horror of revelation. " It's literature," thought Peter to himself, " and what is litera ture but just the very worst life can do?" He came back to his familiar conclusive summary. It was rum. The next quarter of an hour passed more mercifully. The mere empty lapse of time helped him, half duped him into thinking that the scene might not come off at all. It was foolish to be there ahead of time, but what could a man in his predicament do, or 45 THE MANGO-SEED pretend to do, between luncheon and an inter view like that ? They had had, he and Marty, a civilized meal at Plon's ; but he had not been hungry, and to smoke among the stunted box-trees afterward had been well, impossible. They had got to the St. Justin ridiculously early, and then Marty had bolted. Peter didn't bear him any grudge for that ; of course it was perfectly proper for Marty to bolt. It would have been worse, he began to think, to face her first before a witness. By this time he had accepted the smallest writing-room of the St. Justin as the pre destined scene of the great encounter ; accepted it as, perhaps divinely, perhaps diabolically, but at all events supernaturally, appointed. These walls had been decorated by dead people to be unsympathetic and grossly unfit witnesses of Peter Wayne's embarrassment. To that extent they belonged to him. The sudden superstition was genuine ; so genuine that he found himself resenting a bit of chatter that sprang up outside the door and, even more, the immediate quick entrance into the writing- room of one of the chatterers. Why hadn't his mother given him an appointment in her own sitting-room, at her own hotel whatever 46 THE MANGO-SEED that might be? He didn't know; he knew nothing of her since the wireless message that had made the appointment ; and of course since she was managing the thing that way he hadn't even tried to meet her at her steamer, though it had actually docked at some un earthly hour that morning. But she was likely to pay, too, for her perversity, since the lady who had just come in and had sat down rather aimlessly at one of the tables would probably annoy her as much as she did him. He had owned or pretended ? to Marty Martin a furtive curiosity as to this mother of his, whom he had virtually never seen, of whom he hadn't so much as a photograph. Now something quite different stirred within him : the instinct to protect her against any thing she would not like. He suddenly saw her frail and weary and overwrought and quite old pathetically, not ironically, like the little old lady who had hobbled past the door and lie resented any detail that might crown her long effort at reunion with an extra thorn. He was sure she would hate this other woman's being there the younger woman who had just come in, and sat down so nonchalantly. This lady obviously intended to stop long 47 THE MANGO-SEED enough for their discomfiture, since just here he got up and looked at his watch as he did so it lacked scarce two minutes of the ap pointed hour. He looked at the intruder a little impatiently. She wasn't writing. Per haps he could suggest, by some flicker of expression, some implication of gesture, that he wasn't there in that ridiculous galley for nothing, and still less there for casual company. She was slim and smartly veiled and outrageously made up. That was all he saw out of the corner of his eye, but it was enough to make him feel that she had no such rights at the St. Justin as a reunited mother and child. She wasn't waiting for a parent, he knew ; only for some frivolous friend or other. He was so nervous as to wonder if there were any conceiv able way in which one could ask her to go into one of the other rooms. A depopulated chain of them stretched down the corridor. He threw another glance at her. She was well dressed. Peter, though he might know as little as a poodle about the nature of the cur rent fashion, could, like most men, pounce unerringly on the unfashionable. Her exub erance wasn't a matter of gewgaws ; it was all in the meretricious harmonies of her features 48 THE MANGO-SEED and complexion. And yet Peter caught himself away from staring, as he passed her, but one glance was enough to show him that it was a perfectly honest mask ; her paint and powder were as respectable as blue glasses. Again he knew it unerringly. He was glad to recognize it. For at that moment he became so nervous that he did, without a qualm, the most preposterous thing he had ever done, even at two-and-twenty. His mother was imminent ; he knew it in a hundred ways. The atmosphere was charged with more than the mere prospect, was charged with the actual certainty of her. He found that he was going to put it to the lady who sat there. He stood in the door of the writing-room and looked down the dark hall. It was empty, save for a woman who sat humbly near, bonneted, veiled, faithfully clasping some kind of bag obviously a servant. Remembering the bit of chatter, he fancied it the maid of the intruding lady. No one else was in sight. Yet somehow he knew that his mother would be on time : the crisp- ness of her earlier cablegrams promised it. The lady really must go elsewhere, and the maid old and " coloured " and manifestly E 49 THE MANGO-SEED respectable must move down the hall and sit outside another door. He went back, and this time walked straight across to the stranger. " Will you pardon me, madam " (" madam " was a deplorable word, but the powder some how demanded an extravagant formality), "if I speak to you, to ask you something very odd ? " She stared at him through her fantastically patterned veil. " I have been put in the position of having to meet an elderly lady a near relative here for a more or less intimate conversation. I don't think she realized, in making the ap pointment, how little privacy you have a right to in an hotel. It is very long since she has been in a great city. Will you pardon the the really unpardonable liberty of my asking if you are likely to be here much longer ? I mean ought I to arrange to take her elsewhere in the hotel when she comes ? She will be here in a moment." It was a dreadful thing to have had to do, and, if he judged by what the veil showed of the lady's face, it couldn't have been worse done. She looked dismayed. Peter was 50 THE MANGO-SEED angry : so angry that he managed to stop just where he had stationed himself before her ; so angry that he didn't deprecate, that he simply set his teeth and waited. There was nothing he could do now, he felt, to convince her that she hadn't been insulted. She lifted her veil ever so little, just freeing her lips, slightly constricted by its tight- drawn mesh. And she did so, she both rose and spoke. " Aren't you Peter Wayne ? " He bowed, relieved. If they had a ground of acquaintance, he could perhaps cover it all up, make it plausible, get rid of her on some dishonest, hilarious pretext. " I am." He waited ; there was no use in pretending that he remembered her. The veil was lifted farther, then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a voice sounded in his astonished ears. " Turn to the light, my son, and let me look at you. I've not had a photograph, you remember, since you were a child." Even as he faced the light, he was saying to himself that it was rummer than ever ; but it was rummest when he turned for his legiti mate look at her. She was older than he had 5* THE MANGO-SEED assumed the strange lady to be ; but she was a long way from the little old lady in the gray shawl. This was his mother, and it was over he felt it as those sinking for the third time may feel. In another instant he saw his mistake. He had been pulled up out of the surge into the terrible air this was his mother, and it had just begun ! He mastered his breath his breath that under the water had been playing tricks with him. He looked her over, searching stare for searching stare. Her fair hair had lost what must once have been a golden lustre, but it was carefully, elaborately arranged, waved, curled, braided. It was as fashionable as her clothes. The white mask of powder left clear the contour of the fine, thin nose but cloaked the subtler modellings of the face. The blue eyes, idle yet content, looked at him from behind it ; below them it was rent, once, by the scarlet stab of the mouth. Peter remembered vaguely having heard that the tropical sun necessitated such protection. It was the northern dimness and drizzle that turned make-up into a moral question. Even for the grands boulevards^ to be sure, Mrs. Wayne's make-up would have been overdone. This was the chief result of 52 THE MANGO-SEED his searching stare. She wasn't like one's mother at all, confound it ! not like any one's mother. He would have been glad of a little more sophistication than even at wise two-and-twenty he was conscious of possess ing. " Your maid ? " he asked, remembering the figure outside the door. " Oh, yes ; my old Frances. She recalls you as a baby. She'll want to see you. You must speak to her before we go." " But you're not going " "I find I'd better get off to-night. I've learned since landing, that if I do, I can just get a boat at Vancouver. It's not as if I had any business to do. You'll take me to dinner somewhere some restaurant. I don't like hotels." " But you don't mean you've come for only twenty-four hours across all that ? " The straight red mouth elongated itself into a smile. " If there weren't so much of it to cross, I could, perhaps, stay longer. I came only to say one or two things." She spoke as if she had run up from her country place for the day. Peter suddenly revolted against this careless treatment of his 53 THE MANGO-SEED plight. He was glad if his prayers had suc ceeded in averting tragedy. At the same time, he didn't intend to be turned into farce. He hadn't let himself in for all this only to be shirked as he had been shirked for more than twenty years. He meant to know things, hang it ! He had been afraid of a scene ; afraid of twenty years' emotion expressed in an hour ; of a creation of human ties as violent and sudden as the growth of the tree from the mango-seed in the fakir's hands. " In ten minutes you eat the ripe mango," a globe-trotting friend had told him. If he hadn't the fakir's miracle to fear, well and good ; but neither was he going to suffer the other extreme, the complete dehumanizing of the experience. After all, she was his mother, hang it ! If she wasn't going to make him pay well, he would make her pay. Somebody had to get something out of so preposterous a situation. He leaned forward. " Things you couldn't write ? Or have you just funked it, on the way ? " " Funked it ? " Her vocabulary apparently did not hold the word. " I mean oh, I mean, let us talk straight. 54 THE MANGO-SEED You've let it all go for more than twenty years. Now you take it all up again. I'm a gentle man, I hope. I didn't bolt, though you can bet I wanted to. It would have been easier never to have seen you at all." " You've never wanted to see your mother ? " Peter looked out of the window into the familiar street. If it hadn't been for the utter detachment of her tone, he would have felt that she was hitting below the belt. " What do you take me for ? I've nearly died of well, call it interest, more times than I can count up. No little boy likes to have no mother ; likes to have his mother care nothing for him. But I've grown perfectly used to it. And I know I know now, mind you that you don't care. Well, it may not be what I should have chosen, but at least it lets me out. It's too late, now, to make me care." It was by no means the whole truth. But it was what he had been trying, and in vain, to say to himself an hour since about it all. There was some triumph in being able to say it now to her. Her blue eyes turned on him a stranger's sudden kindness. " Where those years bad, 55 THE MANGO-SEED Peter ? I thought they'd be less bad if you began them very young. You see, they had to begin some time." " Oh, they began and they lasted. Now, they're not bad at all. So why rake it all up now ? " If she had been little and old and shaking, he couldn't have pressed the question, he knew. The powdered cheeks, the elaborate hair, the vermilion lips gave him a kind of sanction. There was a pitiful way of wearing rouge, no doubt ; this wasn't pitiful in the least. He didn't know what she looked like underneath the mask, but he could almost have sworn she didn't need it. " I'm not trying to do that. If I've come too late, it's because I feel quite sure that it's too late to undo any of it. I am not trying " her brilliant, dyed smile was extraordinarily little in the maternal tradition "to get a single claw into you. I've come to pay damages, Peter, not to claim them. But you must be very, very, very polite to me. I'm not used to anything else. And America rather frightens me." " I don't want to be anything but polite," murmured Peter, abashed. " And the freer 56 THE MANGO-SEED you really are, the more it's up to you to play the game, don't you think ? " She smiled vaguely, and he saw at once that she belonged to the generation that preceded slangy paradox. She might also have worn a fluffy gray shawl. " I'm sure you don't wish to be anything but polite," she brought out, still vaguely. " But I've odd things to say, and I've come a long way to say them ; and you, my son, must listen." " It's what I'm here for." " Evidemment. How much has Spencer Martin told you ? " " Old Martin ? Nothing at all, ever ex cept the figure of my allowance." " Not why we first went to Hawaii ? " " Good Lord, no ! I might have been a foundling." " You didn't ask ? " She had taken off her gray glove ; and pushed her veil up farther on her forehead, with beautiful white fingers. " No," answered Peter curtly. " A fellow wouldn't ask. You can see that." She seemed to muse. " He would have told you that, I think, if you had. There was no reason why you shouldn't know." 57 THE MANGO-SEED " I naturally supposed, if there was no reason why I shouldn't know, you'd have seen to it that I was told." " So you thought there was something dis graceful something that drove us out of America?" " It has occurred to me. But I never let myself worry about it. And old Martin him self was a kind of proof that there wasn't." " There wasn't." She echoed his words in a disdainful, emphatically affirmative tone. " No, Peter, not that." She paused for a moment, staring out into the gray street. " These women are very ugly, aren't they ? " she asked irrelevantly. " On the boat, they were horrors. And they jerked about so did so many things. Do the men like them that way ? " Her tone was desultory. " I suppose so." He felt a mischievous de sire to tell her how little the men he knew would probably like them her way ; but, in fact, the slow conviction was encroaching on his mind not so much penetrating it as fluidically enwrapping it that she was com pounded of many graces. Her gestures, for example : they were all slow, and each showed off something, if only, for an instant, some 58 THE MANGO-SEED lesser, some negligible contour. She had the air of not having stirred a limb or a feature for years, except to please, and of being now in the practice infallible. She was very femi nine no, hang it ! that dairymaid word wouldn't do. (Peter had been, in college, the proudest product of his several " theme- courses," and the quest of the epithet was not unknown to him.) She was very simple and very sophisticated. He had to leave it at that. " I'll tell you about our leaving America. You ought to have known long since. And yet perhaps it was better your sympathies shouldn't have been touched. If you thought we were brutes, that would leave you free, wouldn't it ? " " It did." " Ah, yes exactly ! " She seemed to triumph for an instant. Then she looked out of the window again, and again spoke irrele vantly. " Are you in love ? " Peter frowned. " No." He was too young not to be stiff about it. " That's rather a pity. I could have ex plained better." " Oh, I know what it stands for." She corrected him gently. " It ' stands for ' 59 THE MANGO-SEED nothing whatever. Either you've loved or you haven't. It might have helped me that's all." Then she seemed to brace herself for difficult exposition. " Listen, Peter. You must know this first. In the months just following your birth, every thing changed. Your father developed tuber culosis alarmingly, it was then supposed. That meant another climate. He owned property in Honolulu. It occurred to him to go there. In not taking you we acted on physicians' advice. There was no telling what sort of life we might have to live. You were best off here. You were under expert care, and in those days we had news of you con stantly. I am quite well aware " her voice grew surer as she went on ; she seemed less fantastically feminine, more simply human " that many women would have chosen dif ferently. For me there could be no question. You had been brought into the world in the belief that there would be no choice to make. We never dreamed, when you were born, of anything but the normal American life. I insist on your realizing that." Peter bowed. It already began to change his vision of himself a little, though he wasn't 60 THE MANGO-SEED sure he liked his mystery to be merely tu bercular. Though if that was all, why in the world but he saw that he could only listen and wait. " Then Honolulu didn't serve very long. We had to go farther away from life. Now we're in Tahiti. It's it's a very wonderful climate." Mrs. Wayne rose, drew the crimson curtain to one side, and looked out. It was a moment before she spoke, and as she spoke she sat down again with helpless grace. " I find it very hard to tell. I don't think I can tell you it all." " I don't see why you should have come at all, unless you are going to tell me everything there is to tell. But if you've really funked it, I don't care, you know." Thus Peter, maintaining his bravado. " You don't help me out." The blue eyes rested on him critically. " But I suppose it's not your fault. Since you don't know any thing about anything " " I can't give you a leg up. No." She frowned a little, as if troubled by his phrasing, but resigned herself to it. " No ; you can't give me a leg up/' 61 THE MANGO-SEED " I say " He leaned forward with a sudden impulse. " Why don't I go back with you ? Or come out later ? Lots of people going to Tahiti now, you know, since they've exhausted the Spanish Main. Plenty of attractions : drives round the island, perfect scenery, native customs on tap ordeal by fire and hot stones. It's in the advertisements along with the rates and sailings. No reason why I shouldn't come." She had drawn back while he spoke with a perfectly obvious terror. With parted lips, and coiled hair, and her very blood (it seemed) turned white, she looked like Greek tragic masks that he had seen in museums. These he had always thought grinning prevari cations ; now, he acknowledged their authenticity. His jauntiness faded into a stare. Then she pulled herself together, as Peter would have said, by slow, difficult degrees, like a kaleidoscope turned too slowly pitiful to see. " No, Peter, you must never come to Tahiti. He he couldn't bear it." " He ? " " Your father/' " Oh my father." His imagination had 62 THE MANGO-SEED not yet evoked his father. " I had forgotten him, for the moment." " Forgotten him ! What extraordinary things you say ! " " Well, why shouldn't I forget him ? He hasn't even taken the trouble to spend twenty-four hours in America to make my acquaintance." Something acrid had risen in the cup, and Peter's lips were bitter. Her white fingers moved again to the folds of her veil, as if the frail mesh weighed intolerably upon her brows. " If you forget him, of course I can never explain. He is all there is." She indulged then in an appraising glance. " You look kind and good. I didn't think you would be undutiful." Undutiful ! It was her turn to introduce an unfamiliar vocabulary. " Undutiful ! " Peter repeated. " What do you mean ? That I'm expected to be grateful to him for being my father ? " She smiled. She lifted her hands. She all but applauded him. " Yes, just that ! " Peter stared. He had two favourite words with which to describe the legitimately sur prising. One of them was " rum." But such 63 THE MANGO-SEED an idea as this called for the other. It was positively " rococo." She went on then. Apparently his ironic question had smitten the rock, for the fluent tale gushed forth, watering all the arid past. But to Peter it was as if a man blinded and drenched with spray should try to drink of it. The first sentences came too quickly. In all his two-and-twenty years they found no context. He had still to learn the way of them. He supposed it was because he was finding out at last what it was to have a real mother. " It wasn't always Tahiti," he heard her saying after a little. " We've tried everything south of the equator, I've sometimes thought. Valparaiso, for a long time. Perhaps you knew ? Spencer Martin " " Never even told me when you changed your continent." He was blindly bitter. Somehow it did hurt, as she went on. " The climate," Mrs. Wayne murmured again. And then she named other stages of their progress all places, Peter reflected, that were in the geographies and in Kipling, and nowhere else. It made his parents sound like vagabonds of fiction. Her trailing narrative 64 THE MANGO-SEED did not add to their reality. The details she mentioned were wildly exotic, and those she took for granted he could not supply. Her careful English was interlarded with strange scraps of Spanish and native names for things which left the objects, for him, unrecognizable. He made nothing out of it except that it wasn't what he should call a life at all. He didn't even see whether it was whim or necessity that controlled them. As soon as anything in her story became coherent or com prehensible, she doubled on her tracks. At first he threw in occasional questions, but the answers didn't explain ; and soon he stopped asking them. A foreignness like that left his very curiosities unphraseable. He came to the point where he didn't even know what it was that he wanted to know. There was, to be sure, the irregularly recurrent stress on the hope of health, an obsession, apparently, under which they had faintly struggled and madly rambled ; but he didn't make much more sense than what he had learned in childhood about Ponce de Leon. You might as well ask a firefly to show you your way. Clearly, she hadn't the gift of biography. He sat very still and intent, trying to make a pattern out of it ; but she merely F 65 THE MANGO-SEED succeeded in dazing him. Then suddenly, when he was most bewildered, it came to an end, ran out in a mere confession of failure. " And nowhere, at any time, has the miracle happened. He has never been well enough to come back. We have always had to stay away." " It must have been a strange life," Peter mused. " Strange ? It may be. Strange for him, no doubt : so fitted for civilization for your world."