CHAPTER IX
DESSALINES' HOUR
LUNCHEON was served in the pagoda above the boathouse; it was correct in every detail, planned by the crowlike Jules, as major-domo, and served by the cat-footed Japanese.
"No," said Dessalines, in answer to a question by Sir Henry, "there is nothing in this scene to remind one of Hayti; this is too tempered, too moderate. Our friend Leyden will tell you that Hayti is a place of strong outline, dazzling sunshine, and black shadows … but then, you must remember that it is not an old civilization like this, or the Japan which we are aping; Hayti is raw; it is a raw, strong, virile people who inhabit it; also, if our early influence could only have been English instead of French!"
"You might not have got your independence, old chap," said Giles. "Your name might have been that of a martyr, instead of a liberator."
For the first time Virginia saw an expression of real annoyance on the black face.
"England would not have kept us as slaves," answered Dessalines.
"That was well said!" cried Sir Henry warmly. "England would have taught you how to rule yourselves and then"
"Put some one on the island to see that you did it," said Leyden dryly.
"Nothing," observed Virginia, "is more ungallant to ladies than to talk politics in their presence." The conversation was turned to lighter topics.
"For your entertainment this afternoon," said Dessalines to Lady Maltby, "I have ordered tea served on the little island a mile up the river. My neighbor, Mr. Radford, has built there a little kiosk which he calls the Temple of Love; he kindly permits me to use it this afternoon for tea."
"That will be charming. And how are we to go?"
"Two of the Japanese will row some of us up in the barge; there is also a canoe in which I had thought that Giles might like to take Miss Moultrie; with Giles outing and exercise are synonyms."
"A chap must keep fit," said Giles.
Virginia felt oddly disappointed; of course it was always a pleasure to be with Giles, but for this one afternoon she wished to watch Dessalines. Her dread of him had given way to a curious interest; she loved to watch the play of the great muscles beneath the light texture of his clothes; there was a peculiar attraction in the rich tones of his voice, and his euphonic phrases and well-chosen words were a never-failing source of surprised interest; it was as if a tiger had glided to her side, purred, and paid a compliment; there was a nightmarish element about Dessalines; he was the perfect figment to haunt one's dreams, yet not in all ways unpleasantly.
"Can the barge carry so many?" she asked.
Dessalines glanced at her quickly. Primitive creature that he was his instincts were swift and accurate and he felt that Virginia was not entirely pleased with this arrangement.
"The barge is quite able to carry us," he replied, "but our progress will not be rapid. There are two more canoes, if any of you prefer to go in that way, in which case those who are left can go in a cedar double-ender which is light and fast."
"Oh, that would be much more of a lark!" cried Miss O'Connor.
"I think I prefer the rowboat," said Lady Maltby; "when one is past forty canoes lose their glamour. Why not dispense with the Japanese altogether and let them take the hampers in another boat? I am sure the poor things must be quite exhausted; first they are 'rikishamen, then they are butlers, then they are boatmen, and then they are silvan stewards." She turned to the naturalist. "Are you ready to become athletic for a mile, Leyden, in my service?"
Leyden bowed. "I am ready to become anything in your service, Lady Maltby."
Sir Henry turned to Miss O'Connor. "Would you be willing to trust yourself with me in a canoe, Miss O'Connor?"
"And if I would not, Sir Henry," replied the Irish girl, "I wouldn't trust myself with you anywhere … oh, whatever am I saying!"
Virginia was seized with a sudden perverse impulse. It had seemed to her that Giles had been more attentive to Miss O'Connor than the occasion demanded; he was very good to look at, that day; clad in his cream-colored flannels he was the picture of a handsome, well-groomed in athletic Englishman, and it was rather apparent that Miss O'Connor thought so.
"Then let Giles take Rose," said Virginia, "and Count Dessalines can take me."
Rose O'Connor flushed; Giles looked surprised; the great, mobile face of Dessalines lighted with pleasure; Virginia, catching the expression, half regretted her whimsical suggestion.
The plan was adopted and they embarked with much laughter. Dessalines and Virginia were the last to start, and then the host discovered that the fresh shell-lac of the canoe was still soft from the sun and sent one of the servants for a robe with which to cover it. The others had already rounded the first bend of the river when he shoved the canoe clear of the little jetty.
Their course was up stream, across the miniature lake, along the edge of flower-flecked banks, under the shade of the pollards, skirting the rim of the rushes where the great savage pike, sunning their backs in the shallows, rushed for the deep water, leaving furrowed trails.
Virginia, sitting well forward to balance as much as possible the great weight of Dessalines who knelt slightly abaft the beam, had little regard for the sweetness of the summer day. She was sitting in a loose heap of cushions thrown upon a rug of flaming crimson, the corners of which trailed in the water with an oriental disregard of precision. Dessalines knelt, knees braced well apart to better balance the unstable craft, and the paddle in his hand seemed the toy of a child. His linen shirt was unbuttoned at the neck, and the great cords stood in smooth ridges against the snowy fabric. He had rolled his sleeves over the elbows, and under the black, satiny skin the long muscles rippled and slid, the one above the other, in a manner which suggested the undulations of a snake beneath the sheeny surface of a pool. He had thrown his cap into the bottom of the canoe and his kinky hair glistened in the sunshine, the rays of which beat so powerlessly upon the dome of the thick African skull.
Virginia was silent for a moment, fluttered; the potentiality of the man's great physique burst upon her afresh and with an unmitigated impulse. At each occasion upon which this physical predominance had forced itself upon her, it had done so with a sense of shock; many things in nature had affected her in a somewhat similar way: swift motion, as in a motor car, a lavish sunset, a bullfight which she had once witnessed in Madrid, but none of these approached the impulse emanating from Dessalines.
Suddenly she realized that he was a man—a living, breathing man, thinking as other men think, more primitive perhaps—and at the thought of the sentient liveness of this great machine she forget Leyden and his theories and their demonstration … lost sight of her own superior mentality, and was filled suddenly with a wild sense of panic; became a timorous woman, cornered, trapped, casting about wild eyed for some avenue of escape.
In a half dozen long, powerful strokes which sent the eddies sucking and swirling for yards in their wake, Dessalines drove the canoe far into the middle of the stream. He looked up at Virginia, crouching in the bow, facing him; virile, primitive creature that he was, he received the impulses emanating from her as a lion would read fear in the calm face of the tamer, and all the brute in him was suddenly cognizant of its power; and all the brute in him seemed to contract its great powerful flank muscles and shoot straight out, clawing at the sunshine, exulting in its untrammeled strength. There crept into his resonant voice a timbre against which Virginia's tone struck flat and drab.
All of this before a word had been spoken; Virginia, feeling her resistance infinitesimal, yet came of a fighting stock; slowly her spirit rallied in revolt against the insidious usurpation of her individuality. Words are less dangerous than the silence of insecurity, also, most animals fear the human voice. She began to talk, with no effort to convey thought or assert herself, but merely to talk … to be an active power.
"You are accustomed to this, Count Dessalines? You seem quite at home in a canoe, and when one considers your weight and that of the vessel, it is extraordinary that you should handle it so easily."
Dessalines smiled one of the swift, flashing smiles which had more than once startled Virginia.
"I have never been in a canoe until coming here. Perhaps it is heredity; perhaps because my ancestors were Kongos … paddled for generations in canoes scooped out from logs!" He dipped the broad blade of the paddle and, with a heave so strong yet so even and coordinate that the trim of the canoe was not altered, sent the light craft flying through the water.
Virginia did not answer at once; instead, she leaned back and watched him through several repeated strokes and noted how at each output of massive force the wide nostrils dilated, the black brows came down in corrugations, and the great lungs expanded in the rhythmic function of supplying oxygen to the furnaces of this great human machine. Predominant among African traits is a sense of rhythm; an accurate perception of tempo, and this perfect periodicity of applied energy is one of the most difficult influences for even the high mentality to resist. There is a saying in dynamics that a dog trotting across an iron trestle will break it down; so Virginia, watching Dessalines as he swung to the paddle with strokes which seemed to lift the buoyant craft almost from the water, and listening to the rhythm of his respiration, all in perfect time, found herself moving, thinking, feeling in accord. They soon passed Giles, laboring up stream with strong, awkward strokes; next overtook Sir Henry who had been the first to start; then they passed Lady Maltby and Leyden, and the next bend of the river found them out of sight of the others.
Dessalines' strokes swept on with unabated power. His gaze, resting on Virginia, became to her insupportable.
"You will tire yourself out," she said with an effort.
The Haytian laughed, low, rich, gurgling. "It is very rarely that I tire; you know my race is famed for its physical endurance."
Virginia was surprised, for in common with most people she had always felt that a negro would be embarrassed at a reference to his race; she had observed several times, and with pleasure, that Dessalines seemed proud of it.
"Are Haytians then so enduring, Count Dessalines?"
"Haytians?" He laughed again. "Oh, no! I was not referring to them, but to the negro race. You know, Miss Moultrie, we are quite extraordinary in our capacity for sustained physical effort, especially on very little nourishment." His oddly tinted eyes rested upon her; their expression altered; from being savage, exulting, dominating, they became brooding, thoughtful. "Do you know, Miss Moultrie, I often think that at one time, perhaps thousands of years ago, we may have been a people of marvelous achievement. It is the history of the world that in time all great races become decadent; go down, down, down to the lowest rung of human existence, enter the valley of the shadow and there abide indefinitely until it is time to reëmerge and begin the ascent again. My race is now far down the scale, yet see how readily it responds to civilizing influences. Is there any other people who have stepped at one stride from pagan influence to civilization? whose aims are always like ours, toward elevation? Consider the degrading influences through which we passed in slavery, and yet consider, if you please, how we have risen when the opportunity has been presented."
"In Hayti?" asked Virginia innocently.
Dessalines' face grew almost savage in expression. "Ah, no! because there the transition from slavery to mastery has been too swift; it should have been from slavery to liberty, and from liberty to mastery. In Hayti all is greed and avarice, the ownership by a few and jealousy of outsiders and of each other. White people are regarded with suspicion and distrust; the Haytians of my class foolishly insist that we are the superiors of the whites."
"How very odd!" exclaimed Virginia, her tact lost in surprise.
"And yet not altogether," replied Dessalines. "Considering that most of the whites with whom we come in contact are not pure white, but half-caste; the yellow population of Santo Domingo. Do you not think, Miss Moultrie,"—the powerful strokes continued rhythmically and the sonorous voice seemed to time itself to the effort,—"do you not think that social equality is less a matter of race than individual?" The great black face was pathetic in its eagerness; there was a note of appeal in the vibrant voice. Virginia was suddenly touched. Dessalines as an animal was magnificent; Dessalines pleading was strangely pitiful.
"I think," she answered gently, "that social equality is less a condition than a name; that the individual of any race who is clean souled, charitable, and true to himself is the peer of any."
The great negro features seemed suddenly illumined. "It is so that I have thought," he answered. "It was for the grounding of these broad principles that I came to England, … and I shall, God willing, go back fully armed with Knowledge with which to drive my people to the light!"
"Would it not be better to lead them?" asked Virginia.
"No, Miss Moultrie; they have not yet reached a point where they can be led; they must still be driven. A republic in such a country as Hayti, with such a people, is absurd, a mockery, an object of ridicule to foreigners; the best thing for Hayti is a king." The great head suddenly came high, the flat nostrils dilated, the eyes widened, and the white teeth flashed. "A king!" thundered Dessalines, his vision focused far beyond the girl; and as he repeated the word the paddle snapped in his great hand; he pitched slightly backward, recovering his balance with the lithe swing of a cat. "Mon dieu! I have broken the paddle; but, no matter, there is another in the canoe."
Virginia was strongly moved.
"And you would be king?" she asked breathlessly. Dessalines as a king, the savage king of a savage island! Nothing could be more appropriate.
His great blue-black eyes flashed up toward her with an expression almost ferocious.
"I have not said that …!" His quick animal instinct read the admiration in her eyes to which his negro blood could not fail to respond. "I have not said it," he repeated less roughly.
"It would be safe with me," replied Virginia.
"Ah, of that I am sure," he answered swiftly, "and if I were king, Miss Moultrie, do you know what my first act would be?"
"No," replied Virginia, slightly drawing back and oddly stirred at something in the expression of the great, black, mobile face.
"It would be this: to place upon the throne at my side a white queen; a woman of consequence, well born, preferably Anglo-Saxon; and to encourage intermarriage with the better class of whites with both sexes of the aristocracy of my country. It is only by intermarriage that my people can be raised above the stigma with which the world views them. It is my belief that ages ago, before the Fall, before we were driven howling to the antipodes, we may have been a white race; that our difference of somatic type, physical differences, simply accompanied this early degeneration; in time we might regenerate back to a higher type, but it fatigues the brain to consider how long a time this might require. Is it not better to make an exchange of our virile qualities with a race of less stamina, but higher culture?"
"But," said Virginia, fighting the emotion, the shock with which his words inspired her, "did you not just say that you objected to mulattoes?"
"Ah, yes, that is true; I do object to the illegitimate, low-caste type. You must understand, Miss Moultrie, that according to existing circumstances mulattoes are in almost every case a class of illegitimates; if bred from the best blood of both races I see no reason why they should not be a grand people; a class strong, intelligent, and desirable to any nation … a class which would represent a bond uniting black and white, a mutual affiliation"—the euphonic words rolled out sonorously—"for our two races!"
The ringing voice, the black, inspired face, thrilled Virginia. The flowing rhetoric was like a chant, a paean, a prophecy. She knew little of these things; she had always thought of mulattoes as a wretched class, physically deficient, morally lacking, mentally freakish; also, she had a vague idea that they were hybrid. Dessalines frightened but excited her; prudence bade her stop his peroration, even while her inclination was all for hearing more.
"Why should we be an alien people?" pursued Dessalines, "herded by ourselves; classed, less through malice than ignorance, almost with the lower animals? Why should we be denied the privileges allowed to Indian, Oriental, Turk, or Slav? Are we not capable of equal attainments? Am I not the peer of any man physically, mentally, spiritually?" The massive chest swelled; the eyes seemed to protrude, while their rims of white widened; the flat nostrils dilated. "Tell me, Miss Moultrie," he leaned slightly toward her, "is there any reason why I should not take a white woman—an English woman, a woman of good birth—to be my wife if I should ever succeed in becoming the king of Hayti?"
Virginia was unable to speak, to think, to take her fascinated eyes from the eager face. After a time she spoke; answered him in some way which made no impression on either, for her own mind was chaotic and Dessalines' had sunk into a brooding apathy.
The rest of the day was hazy to Virginia. Giles claimed the privilege of paddling her back, as Virginia dimly suspected at a hint from Leyden, whose clear eyes she had attempted to avoid. She resented the gaze of the naturalist; she felt him to be biased, unfair, cold blooded, a trifle cruel.
Virginia slept ill that night; visions of Dessalines threw dark shadows athwart her dreams. Two days later he called; several times he rode with Giles and herself. Giles's friendliness toward the Haytian was in no degree diminished, but once or twice when her fiancé was performing some little office for her Virginia had surprised upon the face of Dessalines an expression which shocked and frightened her.
The Haytian joined her one day when she was alone in the gardens; he was supposedly in search of Giles. Virginia was gathering flowers for the luncheon table when his grotesque shadow fell across the rose bushes over which she stooped.
"They told me at the house that I would find some one in the garden"—his voice was like the purr of a well-fed tiger—"but I see only flowers."
Virginia raised herself, flushed, breathless, startled. It was the first time that Dessalines had ventured to pay her a direct compliment. It gave her something of the sensation one might feel if, while wandering in a tropical jungle, a tiger were to slip from the striped shadows, fall at one's feet, and lick the hand with a rough tongue.
"It is evident that the French influence has made itself felt in Hayti," said Virginia lightly, for by this time Dessalines had lost much of his emotional excitement for her, although still holding an odd, negative attraction.
"It is to-day that I have first appreciated its advantage," said Dessalines. "There are many things which I have only commenced to appreciate lately." He looked fixedly at Virginia, who turned away breathless, nervous, dreading, yet perversely attracted at the thought of a confidence, the thought of being shown the dark, hidden recesses of this sinister soul. "You have taught me much, Miss Moultrie."
"I am glad," said Virginia feebly. "I also have learned much from you; you have given me a valuable impression of your race—its lost grandeur and its possibilities. I—I—shall follow your career with interest and sympathy."
Dessalines' metallic eyes flashed; with a quick gesture he caught the girl's hand, bent down from his great height, and brushed it with his lips.
At that moment Manning and Leyden entered the garden from the far end.