Vain oblations

V A I N O B L A T I O N S

BY KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1914 Copyright, 1914, by Charles Scribner’s Sons Published March, 1914 TO J. M. F. AND B. M. F.



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 inaction, 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 observation, 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 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 continents: 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 hyperæsthesia simply to be New English; and the pure-bred New Englander had best stick to the euphemisms, the approximations, the reticences, of his own extraordinary villages. But Mary Bradford 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 discomfort. 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.