Part 2

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 reaching to the top of the petticoat. Her face was oddly marred--uncivilized, you might say--by a large nose-ring, and a metal disk 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 speaking. 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 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 obediently 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, those words, he thought, would reach her, would dispel her shame, or, if she were mad, pierce her madness.

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 at the interpreter. Saxe, stupefied, repeated his speech to the negro, and the latter translated. 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 interpreter 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 evidently 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 outgrown his sluggish _penchant_ for the woman who clung to him. It does not often happen, 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 convinced 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 chief’s very feet, had twined her arms about his ankles, had welded herself to him like a footstool that he could not shake 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 interpreter 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 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 Bradford’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 being able to say unerringly of the woman he loved: “Thus, or thus, in given circumstances, 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 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 instant, 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 consummate 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 rumors 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 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 astonishment.

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 rumor 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 discovered after his death. He may have been 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 successive 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 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 favorite 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 kinsman, 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 apparently could not refrain from talking. Even so, I should have let Mary Bradford’s legend alone, forever, 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 profanation. She may have wondered why God chose so to degrade her: her conduct with Saxe shows beyond a doubt how she rated her 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 face. Her one intent was to deceive him, to steep herself in unrecognizable savagery. If Mary Bradford had conceived of any rôle 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 Bradford’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 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 bewilderment 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 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 Bradford 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 indelicate; 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 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 understood 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.