Chapter 11

Simpson had some little skill with his pencil--a real love for drawing was one of the instincts which his austere obsessions had crushed out of him. He revolved several styles in his mind, decided at length on the simplest, and drew his designs on a ragged scrap of wrapping paper, while the carpenter, leaning down from his chair by the door, watched him, smoking, and now and then fingering the leather pouch about his neck. Simpson, looking up occasionally to see that his sketch was understood, could not keep his eyes away from the pouch--whatever it was, it was not a scapular. He did not ask about it, though he wanted to; curiosity, he had heard, should be repressed when one is dealing with barbarians. But he knew that that was not his real reason for not asking.

"But it is easy," said the carpenter, picking up the paper and examining it. "And the seats of the chairs shall be of white hide, is it not?"

Simpson assented. He did not leave the shop at once, but remained seated on the threshold, following his usual policy of picking up acquaintances where he could.

"M'sieu' is a priest?" the old man asked, squinting at he filled the cocoanut pipe again and thrust it between his ragged yellow teeth.

"Not a priest. A minister of the gospel."

"_Quoi_?" said the carpenter.

Simpson saw that he must explain. It was difficult. He had on the one hand to avoid suggesting that the Roman Church was insufficient--that denunciation he intended to arrive at when he had gained firmer ground with the people--and on the other to refrain from hinting that Haytian civilization stood in crying need of uplift. That also could come later. He wallowed a little in his explanation, and then put the whole matter on a personal basis.

"I think I have a message--something new to say to you about Christ. But I have been here a week now and have found none to listen to me."

"Something new?" the carpenter rejoined. "But that is easy if it is something new. In Hayti we like new things."

"No one will listen to me," Simpson repeated.

The carpenter reflected for a moment, or seemed to be doing so.

"Many men come here about sunset," he said. "We sit and drink a little rum before dark; it is good against the fever."

"I will come also," said Simpson, rising. "It is every evening?"

"Every evening." The carpenter's right hand rose to the pouch which was not a scapular and he caressed it.

"Au revoir," said Simpson suddenly.

"'_Voir_," the carpenter replied, still immobile in his chair by the door.

Up to now a walk through the streets had been a night-mare to Simpson, for the squalor of them excited to protest every New England nerve in his body, and the evident hostility of the people constantly threatened his success with them. He had felt very small and lonely, like a man who has undertaken to combat a natural force; he did not like to feel small and lonely, and he did not want to believe in natural forces. Chosen vessel as he believed himself to be, thus far the island had successfully defied him, and he had feared more than once that it would do so to the end. He had compelled himself to frequent the markets, hoping always that he would find in them the key to the door that was closed against him; he had not found it, and, although he recognized that three weeks was but a fractional moment of eternity, and comforted himself by quoting things about the "mills of God," he could not approach satisfaction with what he had accomplished so far.

His interview with the carpenter had changed all that, and on his way home he trod the Grand Rue more lightly than he had ever done. Even the cathedral, even the company of half-starved conscripts that straggled past him in the tail of three generals, dismayed him no longer, for the cathedral was but the symbol of a frozen Christianity which he need no longer fear, and the conscripts were his people--his--or soon would be. All that he had wanted was a start; he had it now, though he deplored the rum which would be drunk at his first meeting with the natives. One must begin where one could.

Witherbee, sitting in the window of the consulate, called twice before Simpson heard him.

"You look pretty cheerful," he said. "Things going well?"

"They've just begun to, I think--I think I've found the way to reach these people."

"Ah?" The monosyllable was incredulous though polite. "How's that?"

"I've just been ordering some furniture from a carpenter," Simpson answered. It was the first time since the day of his arrival that he had seen Witherbee to speak to, and he found it a relief to speak in his own language and without calculating the result of his words.

"A carpenter? Vieux Michaud, I suppose?"

"That's his name. You know him?"

"Very well." The consul tipped back his chair and tapped his lips with a pencil. "Very well. He's a clever workman. He'll follow any design you give him, and the woods, of course, are excellent."

"Yes. He showed me some. But he's more than a carpenter to me. He's more--receptive--than most of the natives, and it seems that his shop is a gathering place--a centre. He asked me to come in the evenings."

"And drink rum?" Witherbee could not resist that.

"Ye-es. He said they drank rum. I sha'n't do that, of course, but one must begin where one can."

"I suppose so," Witherbee answered slowly. The office was darkened to just above reading-light, and the consul's face was in the shadow. Evidently he had more to say, but he allowed a long silence to intervene before he went on. Simpson, imaging wholesale conversions, sat quietly; he was hardly aware of his surroundings.

"Don't misunderstand what I'm going to say," the consul began at length. Simpson straightened, on his guard at once. "It may be of use to you--in your work," he added quickly. "It's this. Somehow--by chance perhaps, though I don't think so--you've fallen into strange company--stranger than any white man I've ever known."

"I am not afraid of voodoo," said Simpson rather scornfully.

"It would be better if you were a little afraid of it. I am--and I know what I'm talking about. Look what's happened to you. There's the Picard woman--she's the one who had President Simon Sam under her thumb. Did you know he carried the symbols of voodoo next his heart? And now Michaud, who's her right hand and has been for years. Looks like deep water to me."

"I must not fear for my own body."

"That's not what I mean exactly, though I wish you were a little more afraid for it. It might save me trouble--possibly save our government trouble--in the end. But the consequences of letting voodoo acquire any more power than it has may be far-reaching."

"I am not here to give it more power." Simpson, thoroughly angry, rose to go. "It is my business to defeat it--to root it out."

"Godspeed to you in that"--Witherbee's voice was ironical. "But remember what I tell you. The Picard woman is subtle, and Michaud is subtle." Simpson had crossed the threshold, and only half heard the consul's next remark. "Voodoo is more subtle than both of them together. Look out for it."

Witherbee's warning did no more than make Simpson angry; he attributed it to wrong motives--to jealousy perhaps to hostility certainly, and neither jealousy nor hostility could speak true words. In spite of all that he had heard he could not believe that voodoo was so powerful in the island; this was the twentieth century, he insisted, and the most enlightened country in the world was less than fifteen hundred miles away; he forgot that opinions and not figures number the centuries, and refused to see that distance had nothing to do with the case. These were a people groping through the dark; when they saw the light they could not help but welcome it, he thought. The idea that they preferred their own way of life and their own religion, that they would not embrace civilization till they were forced to do so at the point of benevolent bayonets, never entered his head. His own way of life was so obviously superior. He resolved to have nothing more to do with Witherbee.

When he returned to the carpenter's house at about six that evening he entered the council of elders that he found there with the determination to place himself on an equality with them. It was to his credit that he accomplished this feat, but it was not surprising for the humility of his mind at least was genuine. He joined in their conversation, somewhat stiffly at first, but perhaps no more so than became a stranger. Presently, because he saw that he could not refuse without offending his host, he conquered prejudice and took a little rum and sugar and water. It went to his head without his knowing it, as rum has a habit of doing; he became cheerfully familiar with the old men and made long strides into their friendship--or thought he did. He did not once mention religion to them at that first meeting, though he had to exercise considerable self-restraint to prevent himself from doing so.

On his way home he met Father Antoine not far from Michaud's door. The priest would have passed with his usual surly look if Simpson had not stopped him.

"Well?" Antoine demanded.

"Why should we quarrel--you and I?" Simpson asked. "Can we not work together for these people of yours?"

"Your friends are not my people, heretic!" Father Antoine retorted." Rot in hell with them!"

He plunged past Simpson and was gone down the darkling alley.

"You are late, m'sieu'," remarked Madame Picard as he came into the kitchen and sat down in a chair near the cripple. Her manner was less rough than usual.

"I've been at Michaud's," he answered.

"Ah? But you were there this morning."

"He asked me to come this evening, when his friends came, madame. There were several there."

"They are often there," she answered. There was nothing significant in her tone, but Simpson had an uneasy feeling that she had known all the time of his visit to the carpenter.

"I met Father Antoine on the way home," he said.

"A bad man!" She flamed into sudden violence. "A bad man!"

"I had thought so." Her loquacity this evening was amazing. Simpson thought he saw an opening to her confidence and plunged in. "And he is a priest. It is bad, that. Here are sheep without a shepherd."

"_Quoi_?"

"Here are many people--all good Christians." Simpson, eager and hopeful, leaned forward in his chair. His gaunt face with the down-drawn mouth and the hungry eyes--grown more hungry in the last three weeks--glowed, took on fervour; his hand shot out expressive fingers. The woman raised her head slowly, staring at him; more slowly still she seated herself at the table that stood between them. She rested her arms on it, and narrowed her eyelids as he spoke till her eyes glittered through the slits of them.

"All good Christians," Simpson went on; "and there is none to lead them save a black----" He slurred the word just in time. The woman's eyes flashed open and narrowed again. "Save a renegade priest," Simpson concluded. "It is wrong, is it not? And I knew it was wrong, though I live far away and came--was led--here to you." His voice, though it had not been loud, left the room echoing. "It was a real call." He whispered that.

"You are a Catholic?" asked Madame Picard.

"Yes. Of the English Catholic Church." He suspected that the qualifying adjective meant nothing to her, but let the ambiguity rest.

"I was not sure," she said slowly, "though you told the boy." Her eyes, velvet-black in the shadow upcast by the lamp, opened slowly. "There has been much trouble with Father Antoine, and now small numbers go to mass or confession." Her voice had the effect of shrillness though it remained low; her hands flew out, grasping the table-edge at arms' length with an oddly masculine gesture. "He deserved that! To tell his _canaille_ that I--that we----He dared! But now--now--we shall see!"

Her voice rasped in a subdued sort of a shriek; she sprang up from her chair, and stood for the fraction of a second with her hands raised and her fists clinched. Simpson, puzzled, amazed, and a little scared at last, had barely time to notice the position before it dissolved. The child, frightened, screamed from the floor.

"_Taisez-vous--taisez-vous, mon enfant. Le temps vient_."

She was silent for a long time after that. Simpson sat wondering what she would do next, aware of an uncanny fascination that emanated from her. It seemed to him as though there were subterranean fires in the ground that he walked on.

"You shall teach us," she said in her usual monotone. "You shall teach us--preach to many people. No house will hold them all." She leaned down and caressed the child. "_Le temps vient, mon petit. Le temps vient_."

Under Simpson's sudden horror quivered an eerie thrill. He mistook it for joy at the promised fulfilment of his dreams. He stepped to his own doorway and hesitated there with his hand on the latch.

"To many people? Some time, I hope."

"Soon." She looked up from the child; there was a snakiness in the angle of her head and neck. "Soon."

He opened the door, slammed it behind him, and dropped on tense knees beside his bed. In the kitchen the cripple laughed--laughed for a long time. Simpson's tightly pressed palms could not keep the sound from his ears.

IV

Each night the gathering at Vieux Michaud's became larger; it grew too large for the house, and presently overflowed into the yard behind, where Michaud kept his lumber. Generally thirty or forty natives collected between six and seven in the evening, roosting on the piled boards or sitting on the dusty ground in little groups, their cigarettes puncturing the blue darkness that clung close to the earth under the young moon. There were few women among them at first and fewer young men; Simpson, who knew that youth ought to be more hospitable to new ideas than age, thought this a little strange and spoke to Michaud about it.

"But they are my friends, m'sieu'," answered Michaud.

The statement might have been true of the smaller group that Simpson had first encountered at the carpenter's house; it was not true of the additions to it, for he was evidently not on intimate terms with them. Nor did he supply rum for all of them; many brought their own. That was odd also, if Simpson had only known it; the many _cantinas_ offered attractions which the carpenter's house did not. That fact occurred to him at length.

"They have heard of you, m'sieu'--and that you have something new to say to them. We Haytians like new things."

Thus, very quietly, almost as though it had been a natural growth of interest, did Simpson's ministry begin. He stepped one evening to the platform that overhung the carpenter's backyard, and began to talk. Long study had placed the missionary method at his utter command, and he began with parables and simple tales which they heard eagerly. Purposely, he eschewed anything striking or startling in this his first sermon. It was an attempt to establish a sympathetic understanding between himself and his audience, and not altogether an unsuccessful one, for his motives were still unmixed. He felt that he had started well; when he was through speaking small groups gathered around him as children might have done, and told him inconsequent, wandering tales of their own--tales which were rather fables, folklore transplanted from another hemisphere and strangely crossed with Christianity. He was happy; if it had not been that most of them wore about their necks the leather pouches that were not scapulars he would have been happier than any man has a right to be. One of these pouches, showing through the ragged shirt of an old man with thin lips and a squint, was ripped at the edge, and the unmistakable sheen of a snake's scale glistened in the seam. Simpson could not keep his eyes from it.

He dared to be more formal after that, and on the next night preached from a text--the Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us." That sermon also was effective: toward the end of it two or three women were weeping a little, and the sight of their tears warmed him with the sense of power. In that warmth certain of his prejudices and inhibitions began to melt away; the display of feelings and sensibilities could not be wicked or even undesirable if it prepared the way for the gospel by softening the heart. He began to dabble in emotion himself, and that was a dangerous matter, for he knew nothing whatever about it save that, if he felt strongly, he could arouse strong feeling in others. Day by day he unwittingly became less sure of the moral beauty of restraint, and ardours which he had never dreamed of began to flame free of his soul.

He wondered now and then why Madame Picard, who almost from the first had been a constant attendant at his meetings, watched him so closely, so secretly--both when he sat with her and the cripple at meals and at the carpenter's house, where he was never unconscious of her eyes. He wondered also why she brought her baby with her, and why all who came fondled it so much and so respectfully. He did not wonder at the deference, almost the fear, which all men showed her--that seemed somehow her due. She had shed her taciturnity and was even voluble at times. But behind her volubility lurked always an inexplicable intensity of purpose whose cause Simpson could never fathom and was afraid to seek for. It was there, however--a nervous determination, not altogether alien to his own, which he associated with religion and with nothing else in the world. Religiosity, he called it--and he was not far wrong.

Soon after his first sermon he began little by little to introduce ritual into the meetings at Michaud's, so that they became decorous; rum-drinking was postponed till after the concluding prayer, and that in itself was a triumph. He began to feel the need of hymns, and, since he could find in French none that had associations for himself, he set about translating some of the more familiar ones, mostly those of a militant nature. Some of them, especially "The Son of God goes forth to war," leaped into immediate popularity and were sung two or three times in a single service. He liked that repetition; he thought it laid the groundwork for the enthusiasm which he aroused more and more as time went on, and which he took more pains to arouse. Nevertheless, the first time that his feverish eloquence brought tears and incoherent shoutings from the audience, he became suddenly fearful before the ecstasies which he had touched to life, he faltered, and brought his discourse to an abrupt end. As the crowd slowly quieted and reluctantly began to drift away there flashed on him with blinding suddenness the realization that his excitement had been as great as their own; for a moment he wondered if such passion were godly. Only for a moment, however, of course it was godly, as any rapture informed by religion must be. He was sorry he had lost courage and stopped so soon. These were an emotional and not an intellectual people--if they were to be reached at all, it must be through the channels of their emotions. Thus far he thought clearly, and that was as far as he did think, for he was discovering in himself a capacity for religious excitement that was only in part a reflex of the crowd's fervour, and the discovery quickened and adorned the memory of the few great moments of his life. Thus had he felt when he resolved to take orders, thus, although in a less degree, because he had been doubtful and afraid, had he felt when he heard the Macedonian cry from this West Indian island. He had swayed the crowd also as he had always believed that he could sway crowds if only the spirit would burn in him brightly enough; he had no doubt that he could sway them again, govern them completely perhaps. That possibility was cause for prayerful and lonely consideration, for meditation among the hills, whence he might draw strength. He hired a pony forthwith and set out for a few days in the hinterland.

It was the most perilous thing he could have done. There is neither sanctity nor holy calm in the tropic jungle, nothing of the hallowed quietude that, in northern forests, clears the mind of life's muddle and leads the soul to God. There lurks instead a poisonous anodyne in the heavy, scented air--a drug that lulls the spirit to an evil repose counterfeiting the peacefulness whence alone high thoughts can spring. In the North, Nature displays a certain restraint even in her most flamboyant moods: the green fires of spring temper their sensuousness in chill winds, and autumn is rich in suggestion not of love, but of gracious age, having the aloof beauty of age and its true estimates of life. The perception of its loveliness is impersonal and leaves the line between the aesthetic and the sensuous clearly marked. Beneath a straighter sun the line is blurred and sometimes vanishes: no orchid-musk, no azure and distant hill, no tinted bay but accosts the senses, confusing one with another, mingling all the emotions in a single cup, persuading man that he knows good from evil as little as though he lived still in Eden. From such stealthy influences the man of rigid convictions is often in more danger than the man of no convictions at all, for rigid convictions rather often indicate inexperience and imperfect observation; experience, therefore--especially emotional experience--sometimes warps them into strange and hideous shapes.

Simpson did not find in the bush the enlightenment that he had hoped for. He did, however, anaesthetize his mind into the belief that he had found it. Returning, he approached Port au Prince by a route new to him. A well-beaten trail aroused his curiosity and he followed it into a grove of ceiba and mahogany. It was clear under foot, as no tropic grove uncared for by man can be clear; in the middle of it lay the ashes of a great fire, and three minaca-palm huts in good repair huddled almost invisible under the vast trees. The ground, bare of grass, was trodden hard, as though a multitude had stamped it down--danced it down, perhaps--and kept it bare by frequent use.

"What a place for a camp-meeting!" thought Simpson as he turned to leave it. "God's cathedral aisles, and roofed by God's blue sky."

His pony shied and whirled around, a long snake--a fer-de-lance--flowed across the path.

The desire to hold his services in the grove remained in his mind; the only reason he did not transfer them there at once was that he was not yet quite sure of his people. They came eagerly to hear him, they reflected his enthusiasm at his behest, they wept and praised God. Yet, underneath all his hopes and all his pride in what he had done ran a cold current of doubt, an undefined and indefinable fear of something devilish and malign that might thwart him in the end. He thrust it resolutely out of his mind.

V

"I have told your people--your _canaille_," said Father Antoine, "that I shall excommunicate them all."

The priest had been graver than his wont--more dignified, less volcanic, as though he was but the mouthpiece of authority, having none of it himself.

"They are better out of your Church than in it," Simpson answered.

Father Antoine trembled a little; it was the first sign he had given that his violent personality was still alive under the perplexing new power that had covered it.

"You are determined?" Simpson nodded with compressed lips. "Their damnation be on your head, then."

The priest stood aside. Simpson squeezed by him on the narrow sidewalk; as he did so, Antoine drew aside the skirts of his cassock.