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.