They were to go for six months. That would bring them to September. In September, 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 favorable, if not astonishingly so. Ngawa had listened, and his heart seemed to incline 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 preoccupied 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 absented 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, 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 mêlée. 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 color, for the boy answered all the questions of the stricken missionaries before he asked to hear the piano.
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 massacre, 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 unclean 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 been defeated in the war, but he profited by the magnanimity of triumph. It was astonishing 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 this 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 activity during the next months, nor of the results he gained. It was a case where governments 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 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 rumor 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 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 the neighboring 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 information 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 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. However, 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 Mandingo 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 probably 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 sidelong glance at the chief: obviously, he distributed those precious pigments only to his favorites. 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 preposterous 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 preposterous 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 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 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.