Part 5

She rushed from the room, and it took her hours to compose herself. When she would have flung her arms about his neck, his cool English eyes had reproved her, calling her rebellious heart to a halt. For her there should be retreat from the Captain, who always had everything under control, including his own heart. Hers was bleeding unstaunched, for a red woman, when she has given her heart does not take it back. What they call Indian-giving was not the heart of Pocahontas, for its pulse measured out time, that of a country and its founder, if not of herself.

She was not aged, pious and resigned like Moses looking into unobtainable Canaan. She was a young, wild thing, untamed and hopeful yet.

When she came back she had washed away her hot tears, powdered and painted her face, trying to match her stiff London clothes. She was like a bird with its gay feathers taut and drawn, winging away no more ... unless some merciful human opened a window. She reproached him, looking as sad as if death was in the house, as it was in her heart.

"They did always tell us that you were dead, and I did not know that you were not until after I came to England. Only Powhatan did not believe that you were, and ordered Tacomoco to seek you out because he said your people always lie so much."

He smiled, silent for once, and she went on hurting him who had hurt her so much. "You promised Powhatan that what was yours should be his, and he promised the same to you. You called him yours when you were a stranger in his country, and now that I am here in yours, I will call you 'Father'."

Again he thrust her shameless heart back behind her London lady's mask. "You mustn't do that. You are a king's daughter, and I am a poor man looking for a boat."

She reproached him yet again. "You were not afraid to go into my father's country and put fear into all his people but myself." Perfect love, she knew casteth out fear--with the simple wisdom of a child of a childish people. "But now you are afraid to let me call you father. I tell you that I will, and that you shall ever call me your child, and remember that you and I are of one people, and that we are fellow countrymen."

"I cannot, Lady Rebecca Rolfe." He, master of every situation put her in her place in this.

Ah, if one of her could walk demurely down the dull road to "Heacham Hall," clinging to John Rolfe's arm, and keep on with him to "Varina" near Powhatan, bearing other descendants for the pride of Rolfe and Powhatan, but if the other could wing away with Smith going far places! Tragabigzanda had tried to keep him in chains for herself; Pocahontas had saved him only to lose him. He was a man belonging to the world, but to no woman.

She had to be the staid English housewife, not the princess of the wild woods. As she had her wild dreams of a different way out, she looked into his sea-faring blue eyes, and found there no response, only respect for Anglo-Saxon domestic respectability.

"You are the Lady Rebecca, the toast of London."

Toast, that should be a foaming, intoxicating drink, not a staid, insipid dose. She was a sick woman, but even sicker at heart.

"It is not seemly that a poor explorer be familiar with a lady of your position."

Position, she would snap her fingers at it! She wanted yesterday in Virginia fields where the corn tassels tossed in the sunny breeze, or an impossible dazzling tomorrow, but must take dull today. She was in Christian London, where the bells in the church spires chimed monotonously, chastening the savage din in her ears.

She snatched up small Tom who had been gazing at the captain who had strode out of a story book into the room. They left the two men to their boasting--Rolfe of his tobacco crop in the new world, Smith of newer worlds he would set out to conquer.

So John Smith passed out of Pocahontas' life more finally than he had before, because he went deliberately. The hand of death was definitely upon her, not upon him, the more so because she scarcely resisted it. Her Christian resignation, more like that of an elderly saint, than a youthful worldling now gratified, now confounded her serious husband. Gone was her gay delight in the adulation of the London populace, and the frivolity of the court, which he had long since deplored. She had not minded the late hours, the murky London atmosphere, worsening her cough; nor the noise of the cobblestone streets, nor the roisterers beneath their lodgings before, but now she was as weary of London as he was.

She was meekly ready to accompany him to "Heacham Hall," his family's seat in Norfolk, where the sunny air seemed to him the healthiest atmosphere for a cough like hers. While his doubts about mating with a strange woman were long past, he wanted to set the seal of his family's approval upon her. Had there been any doubt about that, news of her London reception had dispelled it.

Sister Pocahontas was not nearly so savage as they had feared, and her amenability to their tutelage gratified their provincial vanity. She was willing to learn how primly a Rolfe wife should fold her hands in church of a Sabbath morning, and tastefully gather roses and stocks from the flower borders to arrange them in the parlor mantel vases. It was important too, to sew a fine seam, or mend to the last thread. Adept needle-women themselves, the Rolfe sisters made a picture in needlepoint of Pocahontas and little Tom. She would learn how to bake a steak and kidney pie, or a goodly pound cake as John liked it.

Strange that whatever they subsisted on over there agreed with John and little Tom, and after a while John decided that nothing else except Virginia air would revive his ailing wife. She was not acclimated to this small, neat isle. Only when she rode horseback, as she had longed to do, reining in beside the trim stable back of the substantial stone house was there the wild gay vein in her eyes that had ever led him where she would. Then she had raced away a while from the broken health and the broken heart.

Soon she was too ill for the rides, and Rolfe arranged passage on Argall's boat, _The George_, which was embarking from Gravesend. Its pitiful passenger was immediately on her deathbed, where her resignation and Christian testimony inspired the beholders: the ministering foreign women and the men, Argall and Rolfe reading scriptures. She was buried beneath the chancel at St. George's Church where her dust rests, some think, out of place.

VII

Argall's ship had put into Gravesend to have Pocahontas buried in St. George's Church. The vestry-book recorded her name erroneously: "Rebecca Wrothe, Wyffe of Thomas Wrothe, a Virginia-lady born here was buried in ye chancell." While the faded writ remains wrong to this day, it was preciously bound in white leather and kept in a vault, and the church building therefore became a shrine, although the argument as to where she lies there, or whether she should be brought here will be interminable.

Thomas was the name of her son, and the child's illness on the _George_, as it put to sea again, distracted John Rolfe, who remembered how he had lost another wife and child almost within grasp of the waves. Again the ship returned to English shores, this time to Plymouth, where the frantic father sought out Sir Lewis Stewkley and persuaded him to take care of the little lad until Henry Rolfe, a London merchant, could take his nephew in charge. Stewkley who was to betray his own cousin, Sir Walter Raleigh, still proved worthy of Rolfe's trust.

At that moment John Smith, who was trying to get support for a New England colony, bustled about Plymouth unsuccessfully, and then tried London. Pocahontas was lost to her own country, but her ambitious Johns both coveted it still for themselves.

Rolfe, in spite of the buffetings of disaster and grief, was a man who got things done as long as he was alive to do them. Without Smith's brilliant, antagonistic and fascinating temperament he, if not Smith, got on to America since that was his aim, and there he took his third wife, Jane, daughter of William Pearce, Captain of James Fort.

Rolfe was made Secretary and was soon put on the Council. He yearned over his absent son for the next few years, and wrote Sir Edwin Sandys that he hoped that he would not be censured for leaving him behind, but that that seemed the only way the lad could survive. A practical man, he requested Pocahontas' stipend of the company. Later Henry Rolfe tried to get more indemnity from the company to repay him for his expenses in bringing up the lad.

Rolfe's marriage with Pocahontas was credited with bringing about eight years of peace with the Indians. But Opechancanough had long bided his time for revenge on the English, grimly sure that the American story would have been different had he been allowed to deal with John Smith. He was called "White Hair Man" because of his white fur mantle. Kingly ermine was never worn more haughtily. He planned the massacre of 1622. Tragic John Rolfe is supposed to have been among the victims.

Rolfe was a marked man as well as a man of mark. While he could have handled his own life ably at any time if violent tragedy had not overcome him, none could have survived his disasters. He achieved the first colonial business success and the first interracial marriage and he had mastered personal grief. He had married three women happily before he was forty years of age, and each bore him a child. He had survived shipwreck and ship illnesses although his first two wives had not. He had thought that he had the red man's land in hand, but was instead in the hands of the red men.

Nevertheless, his son Thomas, then still in England, had inherited lands from his grandfather, Powhatan, and he would return to the land of his Indian fathers and now of his English father, who also willed him lands and carry on in his unique heritage the American tradition. It was reported that the two old chiefs, Powhatan and Opechancanough had gone up and down the country asking about the welfare of the motherless boy in England, and too solicitous for him to return until he was stronger. After Powhatan's death in 1618 Opechancanough talked grandly of giving the whole country to the child. Rolfe had been sent to him to be reassured about the peace between the races ever since the Pocahontas marriage. To him and others Opechancanough declared that the sun should sooner fall out of the sky, than his friendliness.

Another colonist had also been deceived by him. This hopeful missionary believed that he had converted him, and he built him an English house. The chief was so tickled with lock and key, that he tinkered with both constantly. Still the naive builder was killed for his kind pains. In the massacre Indians had sat at table with English at breakfast Good Friday only to slay them wherever they found them, in field or cottage.

VIII

And what now of Smith in England? Neither in Plymouth nor in London did he succeed in getting backers to send him to New England although the Pilgrims studied his maps and books. He wanted to go along with them but he was considered too expensive and too headstrong a companion for such stern settlers. Again he poured out his enthusiasm into another book, for only his pen could keep busy, but that, like his tongue, was no lagger. The man himself remained unemployed and unimportant, for his betters had no idea of letting worth be as recognized as birth. What had he got for exploring and advising for New England?

He began to brood about what Virginia owed him for his risks and services. Land had been the only wages of the London Company and he was not in Virginia to stake his claims. In May 1621 he appealed to the company court and reminded them that he had risked money and peril of his life for the good of the Plantation. He had built up Jamestown, and had given five years of his life at great risk to establish Virginia, and he had spent five hundred pounds of his scant estate in the effort. Surely now he deserved remuneration either from the local treasury or from the general Virginia profit in England--but he got none. The London Company's affairs were not in good shape in either place and the massacre of 1622 made them worse. Incensed at this latest blow to his colony, Smith rashly volunteered to rush to their aid with a small army.

In all of his far-flung adventures there was nothing so satisfying to him as this colony which he had founded. Raleigh had named Virginia, while he had named New England, but Virginia was his first love, and he much preferred her sporting planters and adventurers to the pious and thrifty townsmen of New England. If there was a woman in his life, it was Virginia--not Pocahontas nor any other. Virginia had never got out of his blood. He dreamed of cementing the two coasts on one map, but this, like his every proposition, was turned down.

Rebuffed, he brought out a revised edition of his _New England's Trials_, and expressed his love of the American outpost eloquently, "I may call them my children for they have been my wife, hawks, my hounds, my dice and in total my best content, as indifferent to my heart as my left hand to my right." As a patroness for his handsome book _The General Historie_ in 1624, the Duchess of Richmond came to his aid.

Smith had important male backers of his literary works now, if not of explorations. When he wrote the _Seaman's Grammar_ in 1629, Sir Samuel Saltonstall was the backer. Among his friends was a collector and scientist whose house was called "Tradescant's Ark." If he had not been close to Smith how could his collection include Powhatan's discarded robe, Indian combs, rattles, bows and arrows, feathered crowns and tobacco pipes? Smith even willed him a fourth of his library.

Smith's _True Travels_ appeared in 1629, and the incredible tale of his adventures read well to Londoners who were disturbed with financial depression and with the plague besides.

In order to escape the plague Smith spent much time in the country near Essex in the hospitable home of Sir Humphrey Mildmay. Mildmay dubbed his wife "the old woman," and he often escaped his family with the boisterous and masculine Smith to roam his fields, to hunt, fish, dice and drink. His six children delighted in their tarrying visitor, but Smith often eluded the happy and hearty family to write history in his own room. The huge home had wings, and it was set in a shady grove from which he could see London, thirty miles away, on clear days. He did not tarry there indefinitely being sometimes impatient for London itself where he also had a room in Saltonstall's house.

Yes, he had patronizing friends, but he was alone in his frustrated hopes. He had been so far and done so much as a leader of men whether they admitted it or not, and as such he was a being apart. He had been so as an adolescent who had lost his father by death, his mother by marriage, who had quit school and master as well as home. As an adult he had left country, colony and yet another colony, and when he wanted them back they had not wanted him. Finally, he was lonely because he had risen above his class in society without ever feeling secure among his betters in spite of their hospitality to an entertaining explorer and literary notable. Smith was ever without a home of his own, if never without a hope.

As time went on while the hands of benevolent ladies helped him over hurdles, men were usually the ones beside him, if not back of him. He could visit for months at a time as at the Mildmay's or for years as at Saltonstall's.

It was at the latter house that he died suddenly at the age of fifty-one. He had made arrangements for a dignified burial, knowing that others would not make it what it should be--before history inevitably brought him into his own. Where Shakespeare willed arms, he, Smith, the hero of legends as well as the author of them, willed books--of which he had written many and read more. An epitaph in brass extolled his feats: the victory over the three Turks; and the claim, that he had "dispersed the heathen like smoke" and made their land "a habitation for a Christian nation." Because he was buried there, St. Sepulchre's would become a shrine even as St. George's has.

* * * * *

Regardless of the fact that Pocahontas married John Rolfe, the public unites her name rather with that of Smith. The three make up an integral triangle. Each lived briefly, but intensely, Pocahontas passing first in the springtime of her life. Rolfe had wanted to take care of her, giving her protection, and glory in both of their countries, and proud descendants. He was more than just her husband. The poet Stephen Vincent Benet puts it:

"You may think of him as Pocahontas' husband, He was rather more than that and his seed still lives, And we would do well to fence the small plot of garden, Where, in hose and doublet, he planted the Indian weed."[1]

For all of his practical ability, fate allowed him neither to take care of her nor of himself. He met violent death at the hands of her people, dying in her country just as she had gone first in his, for neither was able to survive an alien way of life.

Although Smith adventured valiantly for God, and Rolfe persuaded himself that he had married the Indian maid to save her soul more than her heart, Pocahontas, the purer spirit, transcends both.

The spirit of Pocahontas broods yet on her own side of the great salt waters. Her dust rests out of place at St. George's Church on the Thames, even if it is named the "Chapel of Unity" for all faiths, because of her peaceable heart.

"Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a paw-paw in May ..." mused the poet Carl Sandburg. "Did she wonder? Does she remember ... in the dust, in the cool tombs?"[2] She lives, believed the poet Vachel Lindsay, in the waving corn, and in her spiritual descendants, the American people. She lives still in the blood of some Americans, but for longer in her poignant tale, whose true red hue has not paled through the years.

_Historical Background_

The story of the rescue of America's prime folk-hero, John Smith, by Pocahontas, America's most appealing heroine, fills such a patriotic need that it would have been fabricated had it been untrue. It passed for sure history for two hundred and thirty-six years, except for the feeble denial of Thomas Fuller in his _Worthies of England_.[1] Smith held his own word to be the first and last about history and himself. Yet now the howling squabble over his merits, never hushed in his time, flairs again after three centuries.

In 1860 Charles Deane of Massachusetts asked why Smith had concealed the story for sixteen years.[2] Henry Adams, while he bowed to Pocahontas as the most romantic figure in American history, and as the visiting celebrity of 1616 in England, stepped up to Deane's standard,[3] as did William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay,[4] and the Southern scholar, Alexander Brown.[5]

But William Wirt Henry,[6] Mrs. Mary Newton Stanard,[7] and Lyon G. Tyler[8] remained fast friends of the cherished tale. Edward Arber, the most careful editor of Smith's work, accepts it.[9] John Fiske points out that the printed text of the _True Relation_ was incomplete for Smith had written much which his editor in London omitted as "fit to be printed."[10] Allan Nevins, in _The Gateway to History_, suggests that Smith may have told the story in 1608.[11] Mrs. Stanard[12] and William Wirt Henry[13] also stress this fact. Edward Channing assails the story[14] but Charles M. Andrews accepts it.[15] Many more writers contend that Smith may have deliberately kept the story dark in order that possible new colonists might not be frightened. The tale was not denied when it was told to Smith's contemporaries in 1624.

Many public school teachers have taken the middle ground that the story is almost indispensable and is probably true. Bradford Smith, whose biography of Captain John Smith is notable among a score on the subject, declares that there is not a scrap of evidence to disprove the narrative, and many reasons to establish it.[16] Without the story it would be hard to explain why Powhatan spared Smith since, according to Smith, two Indians had been killed.[17] It was customary for a chief's daughter to be allowed the life of a favorite captive. Juan Ortiz had been saved twice in this manner near Tampa, Florida, nearly a century before.

While Smith is considered a boastful liar by Alexander Brown and others, he still has not only reluctant admirers but fervent defenders among historians. Matthew Page Andrews admitted: "Than Smith there has been no more daring adventurer in English history."[18] Say Henry Steele Commager and Allan Nevins in _The Heritage of America_, a source history for Virginia's high schools: "He was a figure worthy of the English race which found in him the first great American representative.... Smith was worth all the others put together."[19]

The public has been inclined to couple the Indian maiden's name with that of John Smith, more than with that of John Rolfe. But this present author's point that Pocahontas did not know that Smith was still alive when she married Rolfe, and that she was still in love with Smith, is unusual. However, it is not original. It has been taken in some plays and short stories. William Wirt Henry's address before the Virginia Historical Society in 1882 and Samuel Purchas's _Pilgrimage_[20] suggest that Smith could have married her had he so desired. This book is presented as a probable story rather than as documented history.

THE POCAHONTAS-JOHN SMITH STORY is most stoutly defended not by historians, nor even patriotic societies, but by poets, dramatists, and idealistic youth, who think that it is theirs, and by descendants, who know that it is theirs. The line is utterly Virginian be it in blood or ink from the Pocahontas, who like Will Rogers's ancestors "met the boat" to the Pocahontas who wrote the book. And so I sign here

POCAHONTAS WIGHT EDMUNDS.

_Halifax, Virginia_, _April, 1956._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Thomas Fuller, _The History of the Worthies of England_ (John Nichols, ed.; London, 1811), I, 189.

[2] Charles Deane (ed.), "Edward Maria Wingfield, 'A Discourse of Virginia,'" _Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society_, IV (1860), 92-95n.

[3] Henry Adams, "Captaine John Smith, Sometime Governour in Virginia and Admirall of New England," _Chapters of Erie and Other Essays_ by Henry Adams and Charles F. Adams, Jr. (Boston: J. R. Osgood & Company, 1871), pp. 192-224.

[4] William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay, _A Popular History of the United States_ (New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1885-1886), I, 282-283.

[5] Alexander Brown, _The Genesis of the United States_ (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1890), II, 1006-1010; _The First Republic in America_ (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1898), pp. 56-57, 469n.

[6] William Wirt Henry, "The Settlement at Jamestown With Particular Reference to the Late Attacks Upon Captain John Smith, Pocahontas and John Rolfe," _Proceedings of the Virginia Historical Society at the Annual Meeting, February 24, 1882_ (Richmond: 1882).

[7] Mary Newton Stanard, _The Story of Virginia's First Century_ (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1928), p. 47.

[8] Lyon G. Tyler, _Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606-1625_ (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1907), p. 28.

[9] Edward Arber (ed.), _Travels and Works of Captain John Smith_ (Edinburgh: J. Grant, 1910), I, xiv-xv.

[10] John Fiske, _Old Virginia and Her Neighbours_ (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1897), I, 103-108.

[11] Allan Nevins, _The Gateway to History_ (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1938), pp. 139, 150.

[12] Stanard, _op. cit._, p. 48.

[13] Henry, _loc. cit._