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 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.
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 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 meaningless 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 Antagonist, 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 contemplate is, in the end, to know. The stigmata received by certain saints are, I take it, irrefutable 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, the most bitter single experience ever undergone by woman; and much of the extraordinary 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 differently 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—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 denomination. 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 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 indestructible. 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 you can call it a seaport, for there is a great reef a few miles out, and the infrequent steamships 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 large-ish 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.
In March, after Mary reached the Mission (she sailed in July, immediately after graduation), 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 earshot 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 rumors 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 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 protégés. He was, like them, a victim of circumstances.