Mistress Joachim

I

WHEN Father Kinkaid, the Moravian pastor, went into his study after his siesta he found on his desk a pink envelope addressed to him and marked ‘urgent.’ He had not heard anyone bring it. Far from feeling a desire to tear it open, he sat down to enjoy a speculation as to what it might contain. The possibilities of things urgent in Frederiksted seemed to him simple and limited. At this hour of the day the little town was just stirring languorously from slumber, a few jalousies were opening, the streets were silent and empty under heavy sunlight; beyond lay the tranquil countryside, great houses moored in seas of cane stubble; in the fields negroes, impersonal as ants, moved about their accustomed toil. He picked up the envelope and examined the handwriting. It was rather childish, unformed. A perfume, probably French and expensive, floated up from it, bringing to his mind that detestable Haitian poet, Dumenisl, with his crinkly imperial, and a Cape jasmine in his buttonhole. That fellow was always odorous with some scent or other; he left a trail behind him in the street. But it was extremely unlikely that Dumenisl should be writing him a note. They had never spoken except to salute in passing. It was unlikely indeed that anyone should write him such a note. If he had not believed himself to know intimately everyone in Frederiksted, or at least to know all about everyone, he would have imagined that, like some box of Pandora, it contained extraordinary passions and terrors. It was probably a request for the loan of five francs. And one thing was certain — it was more amusing unopened than read.

A step sounded in his doorway. ‘Come in, Vashti, ’ he said, looking up. A negress stood there in her bright madras, topped by a big straw hat. She was barefoot and carried a wooden tray of little rolls covered by a napkin. She stood uneasily shifting her weight from foot to foot.

‘Father,’ she began in an incredibly nasal voice, ‘Father’ — and stopped.

‘Go on, Vashti. Has he been beating you again ? ’

‘Yes, Father. Last week he break my mouth with a rock, ’ — she pointed to a swollen jaw, — ‘and then he climb up in the turpentine tree, so to harass I before the neighbors and make a far-away scandal. But that is not the trouble I come about. He does do bad things — plenty bad. ’

‘Perhaps he feels you have not been too good to him, Vashti. ’

Her voice climbed without transition to a shout. ‘Me bad! My soul! With he t’iefing my best fowls to give to that hussy, that Eglantine living by the market? No, man! It is not I who is bad.’ The blaze in her eyes died; she took a wheedling tone. ‘He does do something plenty bad, though. They put him in the fort for it, please God.’

Father Kinkaid leaned back in his chair. ‘Well, I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t believe in women bearing tales against their lawful husbands.’ He felt the weakness of the refusal. What he really wanted was to avoid the dreariness of a domestic recital. ‘Well, tell me then, if you must, ’ he said resignedly. ‘ I may be able to help you. ’

But his refusal had checked her. He could watch, like the struggle of a beetle on the floor, all her indecision suddenly roused by unlooked-for opposition. She rubbed her forehead with a large-knuckled hand and frowned at him. He waited a moment, but her tongue was locked.

‘Where does Joseph work now?’ he prompted.

She still hesitated, a bit sullen because he had confused her.

‘At La Grange, ’ she said reluctantly.

‘ Well, it is a good thing he is working there. They are splendid people to work for. They must be very busy too just now.’

She looked away with something furtive in her eyes. ‘La Grange don’t see that fellow long.’

‘See here, Vashti!’ He banged his fist, on the table. ‘If you have any mind to practise tricks on him or on Eglantine you will suffer for it. Can you people never learn to control yourselves? Don’t you know what makes you different from those swine out there in the street? It is your power to exercise control over your functions, over your reason. The moment you cease to do that you become like them again. Don’t you see?’

‘Father, I put no obeah on he or anybody. I kiss my hand to Jesus, it is so!’ She kissed it and tilled her straw hat forward on her head. ‘Father, I would not have the pre-sumption to come to you, but you does be so good to a poor girl, and I don’t want harm coming to you. ’

‘No harm is coming to me, Vashti.’

She lowered her eyes almost coquet - tishly. ‘No one knows what the Lord have in store for us, Father.’

‘Quite true,’ he murmured. ‘Well, go think it over, Vashti. Send Joseph to me and I ’ll talk to him. And by the way, have you any bread for me?’

She lifted her napkin and took out six little rolls on a cardboard. She put them on the desk while he looked in the drawer and discovered two Danish francs. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘An exorbitant price for you — be off with it.’ He put it in her hand and added, ‘And be good. ’

She turned to go, stupidity, bewilderment, and a little relief on her face. At the door she suddenly stepped aside to make way for the tall figure of a woman, who brushed past into the room.

Father Kinkaid looked up. He did not recognize the woman, but she turned to speak to Vashti a moment.

‘Are you Joseph’s wife?’ she asked.

‘Yes, Mistress.’

The woman continued to stare at her, then said shortly, ‘Go home. Do not talk so much.’

‘Yes, Mistress — at your service, Mistress.’ Vashti drew her hat farther across her eyes and slipped out the door.

Father Kinkaid recognized her now. She was Mistress Joachim, and if he had picked the least likely visitor from the island it would have been she. He frowned at her a moment without rising. The sun had come to the line of his desk and struck all his scattered papers, casting a glow on his rather small face, which was without beauty and had only a wide, humorous nose to give it strength.

‘Good afternoon, Father,’ she said a bit sharply, as if to call herself to his attention.

‘You wanted to see me?’ he asked, standing up at last.

‘Yes. Is it so surprising? Let us go into the garden. Your study is so close, and I should like to see your plants.’ She rustled ahead of him into the open space between houses which was his garden. It was paved in tiles, and against the yellow plaster walls bloomed a splendid little forest of crotons in jars, copper-leaved, bronzed, gilded, or stained as with wine. There was a well in the centre of the court; painted iron chairs, and an old Danish lamp turning green. They sat down facing each other, while Father Kinkaid looked keenly at his visitor.

She was, in her blue-gray silk dress covered by a black lace shawl, quite monumental; his own small, elegant figure seemed to shrink as he looked at her. She carried a black carriage parasol, wore a French hat with plumes, French gloves; but, despite the sober colors she had chosen, her cheeks and lips, her throat, glowed with the exuberant brilliance of tropical fruit. He recalled various things he had heard of her: that her grandmother was a ‘tie-head’ and squatted in the market place of Charlotte Amalie selling vegetables from a wooden tray; that she herself had passed from lover to lover, beginning with a steward in Government House and progressing by way of a Danish sailor from one of the warships (and goodness knows how many others) to one of the wealthiest Jewish merchants of Charlotte Amalie. This Joachim, already an old man, had left her a considerable portion of his fortune. His name she had brazenly appropriated after his death. She had only recently come to St. Croix, where she lived in a big house and, among a certain society of the place, passed for a lady of consequence and great elegance. It was true that of late she was talked about for associating with some of the element that was provoking unrest among the negroes on the estates. She was even suspected of supplying them with funds and of lodging certain persons from Haiti and Santo Domingo in her house. Probably, however, this was all market gossip. She was a regular attendant at church. On one occasion, when he had given her the Communion, tears had streamed down her face. He had said to himself that for the moment she probably fancied herself a repentant Magdalen.

While he continued to look at her keenly and not too kindly, she took out a black fan and fanned herself in a manner which was irritating, as being, like the rest of her, an imitation of elegance. ‘Does she wish me to suppose,’ he said to himself, ‘that she is unaccustomed to the heat?’

‘Mistress Joachim,’ he said briskly, ‘I am sure you have come to see me on some important matter.’

‘Are you in a hurry?’ she asked languidly. Her voice had the singsong of the Creole, but it was richer-toned, with a romantic sort of huskiness, from rum probably, and she was short of breath so that she was obliged to stop every now and then, even in the midst of sentences, to draw a sharp sigh. ‘Because if you are, I can come again. ’ But she settled back more deeply.

He was still amazed that she should have come to see him. Was there to be a discussion of her religious progress, or, most likely, was she presuming on her only possible trespass into that luminous world of white respectability?

‘I am sure your errand is of sufficient importance to detain me. ’

‘Why must it be so important?’ She smiled at him, and her teeth were large and white. ‘But what is this great work you would do if I were not here?’

He shrugged his shoulders as if urging her to abandon flippancy.

‘Suppose, Father, you estimate for me the importance of saving a human soul — mine, for instance.’ She caught her breath in a sigh, then added suddenly, ‘Or your own.’

‘So you have come to save souls between tea and sundown,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I am afraid it cannot be done in that manner.’

‘But in what manner?’ she insisted. ‘That is just what I came here to find out.’

‘Mistress Joachim, you are proposing your question to me as an allembracing generality, after the manner of Pontius Pilate and all the rest of those who have no desire or expectation of being answered. What, exactly, is the advice you want? Tell me and I will do my best to help you.’

’ I do not see why it could not be discussed a bit more impersonally. You priests are so annoying. You are all alike: you demand instant confession, and you then have us at such an inconceivable disadvantage. ’

In order not to give way to an increasing irritation he kept silent. He had a method of saying to himself, ‘This is of no importance whatsoever,’ and then attempting to focus his mind on something colossal — the great scheme of God’s redemption, for instance. On the occasions when this attempt failed, and this was one of them, he then felt justified in depending for his equilibrium on his sense of humor.

‘There are a number of valuable and trustworthy books on ethics and religion which I will be glad to place at your disposal. Mistress Joachim. You will find in them rules which can be applied to every conceivable problem.’

’ You think so! What do your Christian Fathers know of my problems!’

She might well ask, he thought, as he considered the blood that flowed fantastically in her veins — blood of many like himself, blood of many Vashtis.

‘The wisdom of God covers all,’ he told her vaguely, realizing that she would scarcely be specifically comforted by that statement.

‘You are like them all — you do not really want to help me!’

‘But I do. Only we cannot get anywhere like this. You must tell me frankly what you want, what troubles you.’

‘Father,’ she said, leaning forward, her strange hazel eyes alight, ‘I cannot seek help from you, or perhaps bring it, without first finding out if you are worthy.’

‘So you intend to test me first?’ he asked as lightly as he could. He wished she were not quite so unexpected, that her face were not so vividly emotional.

‘I must find out!’ she cried.

‘Well, after all that is a wise precaution. Would that more of my parishioners would take it — I should have more time to myself.’

Mistress Joachim rose and began to walk about, examining his plants. He could not help that it had become a contest between them. He watched her and observed that she was decidedly corpulent and too tightly laced to move with the grace of native women who carry loads on their heads. But it was easy to imagine what she had been at sixteen.

‘Your crotons thrive in a diabolical manner,’ she observed. ‘And do tell me what the little eggshells are doing there in the tubs?’

‘ To protect the young shoots. Surely you know all these little tricks of the country. Your own garden is famous. Do you pack charcoal in the roots?’

‘I really don’t know. My roses are fine, but my gardener attends to them.’

She turned and looked at him with what seemed a trace of mockery.

‘A thousand apologies! I had supposed your own fair fingers tended them.’

‘Oh no, indeed. I lead a very lazy life. I shall wake up some morning to find my figure gone entirely. But what can I do about it? What activities are open to me? My servants do everything, and when I leave my house I do not set foot to the ground.’

‘The oppression of riches,’ he murmured.

’ But my figure really worries me. I can assure you it used to be worth looking at.’

‘I do not doubt it. But which is it

we are trying to save, your figure or your soul?’

She stopped in front of him and laughed. ‘You are the most amusing man! I always tell all my friends that you are certainly the wit of Frederiksted. Why, even in the midst of your sermons I sometimes feel an irresistible impulse to burst out laughing.’

‘You are flattering me! Especially as my sermons are not intended to be amusing.’

‘Perhaps not. But is n’t it nice that they are? They are the one bright spot in the dry, reformed ritual. Now in church I want to be enveloped in music, jeweled lights, incense, as one is in the cathedrals I saw in France — only more than that, much more. I want to see you in a robe of cloth of gold; I want what you say to be lively, moving, dramatic.’

‘You want an opera’ — and, despite the diverting suggestion of himself in a cloth-of-gold robe, he felt discouraged. ‘But seriously, why not join Rome, or,’ he added with conscious malice, ‘try the religion of the late Joachim — a dash of Oriental gorgeousness — ’

‘You enrage me!’ she cried in a voice much too loud. ‘Why is not what I want as valid as what you want?’

‘Probably it is. ’

‘But you don’t really think it is!’

He did not answer. She leaned back and half shut her eyes as though studying something at a distance.

‘Perhaps it will be I who will see the heavens open like a scroll, and the saints singing inside in the glory of God.’

The unrestrained expression of her face made him instinctively turn away his eyes.

‘You do not want that?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he answered quietly. ‘I distrust visions, ecstasies, the trances of the saints. They seem to me unbridled indulgence, a sensuality of the soul.’ He glanced at her and saw her standing before him with eyes fixed. He determined not to say any more.

‘Please sit down.’ She dropped heavily into a chair. Her face relaxed and she unfurled her small black fan and began to fan herself.

’Oh, by the way, Father.’ Her husky voice had lost its touch of wildness, though there was still a trace of it in her kindled eyes. ‘By the way, could I persuade you to adorn one of my simple little gatherings some evening? I have spoken so much about you that I want some of my friends to meet you.'

It flashed over him that this was what she had come for. He was surprised to find that he was disappointed in her.

’I go about scarcely at all,’he said kindly, ‘and my evenings are all taken up with work.'

‘But if it were important for you to come — very important indeed.'

He glanced at her hands and saw that her knuckles were blue from clenching her fan so tightly.

‘Why do you ask me?’ he demanded.

Her face reddened as if a hand had struck it. ‘Why should I not ask you? Is there any reason why you should not come? As a matter of fact you will meet in my little salon more entertaining people than you are accustomed to. Sometimes Sicur Rosmer plays very brilliant concert pieces for us; I have a good piano — a Gavcau. Or Monsieur Dumenisl recites his verses. They are very well thought of in Paris, I assure you, among people who know/

Mistress Joachim leaned forward and touched his arm with her tightly clenched fan. ‘Come this evening,’ she urged. ‘Come with me now and dine with us. You will not repent of it, I assure you.'

‘I really cannot come/ he said, with absolute finality.

She unfurled her fan and leaned backward, holding it across her face, to hide what he supposed to be a convulsion of rage.

‘Come, come,’ he said, ‘do pull yourself together/

She bowed her head, still holding the fan across her face.

Suddenly she got up, drawing her lace shawl about her. He purposely did not look at her, and when her parasol fell he was glad to stoop for it. As he held it out to her all her big white teeth flashed in a smile.

‘Good-bye, Father.’ Her voice was once more husky and seductive. ‘I will never trouble you again. It seems we cannot help each other after all/

‘ I will take you to the door/ he said, relief obvious in his voice.

‘Rest, then, in your immeasurable pride and superiority/ She kicked her skirt aside viciously with one foot and moved across the court. He followed her to the door. There she turned.

‘Remember me when you come into your kingdom,’ she mocked. ‘It will not be long, I promise you.’

She was gone.

II

Father Kinkaid sat down to the quiet of his garden in the soft afternoon light. He tried to dismiss Mistress Joachim from his mind. But the irritation she had produced remained. Threats and reproaches! What in the devil was she driving at ? And as to her soul — ‘I wonder,’ he said to himself, ‘ if I have saved one soul in my ten years’ work here.’ Behind this doubt hovered an always unacknowledged one: can any soul be saved, or, worst of all, can it really be lost ? He got up and began to walk restlessly about. ‘I am tired and need a vacation among my own people. Twelve years here is too much. These people are getting on my nerves. All this superfervid faith, the miracle, the vision, they seem to be for the ignorant, but for me — for me — what!’

He went into his study and sat down at his desk. There lay the pink envelope where he had left it. He saw the word ‘urgent’ and smelled the perfume that had suggested the Haitian poet Dumenisl. He tore it open and stared at the illiterate scrawl it contained.

‘Father, I believe you to be a good man and worthy to be saved. Even the great city of Sodom would have been saved for ten just men, and it is in your power to save all. There is destruction planned for to-night. A hurricane of fire and blood will pass over the island. If you are like the rest of them, full of false pride and scorn, then perish with them. If you are humble, save them and be saved with them. I will be with you in less than an hour.’

No more.

Involuntarily, when he had finished it, he cried aloud, ‘Mistress Joachim!’

Well, after all it must be studied. There might be a grain of sanity in it. It was not the first threatening letter he had received. ‘But,’ he thought, ‘she does go in a bit more for drama and bloodshed. Really her manner does not prepare one for the violences of her epistolary style. But I cannot understand how a woman of her vigorous mind and experience of the world could write such a thing — unless there were some grain of truth in it.’ How much truth, he wondered. A slight and disagreeable feeling of uneasiness touched him for the first time. There Was Vashti and her evident desire to tell him something; all he had heard of serious unrest among the plantation labor, rumors of Mistress Joachim’s connection with it; the absence of the Governor from St. Croix, the known weakness of the commander of the small garrison at Frederiksted. And yet nothing had happened for years, and to give a warning based on the note of an unbalanced woman was not to be thought of. He tore the paper into little bits, took up his hat, and went out.

Mistress Joachim’s house was but a short walk from his own. As he made his way there it seemed to him that, for the cool of the day, the streets were unusually empty. Only a few old women squatted under the arcades selling pink and white sweets. He stood outside the door for a moment surprised that it was so difficult for him to concentrate. ‘Now, when I need perfect equilibrium, I pray God may give it to me.’

He pulled the cord on her door and a bell jangled inside the house. He rang a second time, but no one came. As he rang a third time the clamor of the bell, dying slowly, suggested great empty rooms shrouded in shadow; he thought of a place suddenly abandoned, with perhaps a chair overturned, an air of disorder and flight , all poignantly suggested in the strange, unnatural stillness. He was convinced that there was no one there. But just then he heard steps; the door opened and the black face of Mistress Joachim’s butler appeared. His voice was like stale molasses; his smile was insolent. ‘Mistress Joachim is not receiving this afternoon.’

’But’ — the door closed on him. He shook it fiercely, but it was securely bolted. He seized the cord and pulled it again and again, selling up a din as alarming as though someone had unexpectedly commenced to scream. ‘That will disturb her siesta,’ he thought. Suddenly it ceased; the cord had been cut or detached from the inside. He mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. ‘See here, this is serious. No temper.’ He looked about him. The town was still bathed in dreamy light, and at the end of the street lay the purple sea, but in less than an hour it would be black night. What was all this about, anyway? A mad woman! Forget all about it. Go home and enjoy a good supper. Someone had sent him wild wood doves — a delectable dish.

For a second he hesitated; then he walked around to the back of the house and into the gate leading to the kitchens. The door of the dining room was open and he could see a maid, who was one of his parishioners, setting Sheffield candlesticks on the table and laying out silver for many people.

‘Good evening, Lucy,’ he said casually as he walked in. ‘Madame upstairs?'

She nodded, in her surprise unable to close her mouth. He found the stairs in the gloom of the hallway and went up them slowly. He was in the salon of Mistress Joachim.

It was flooded with level primrose light; all the gilt mirrors, the polished tops of tables, the crystal candle shades, were shining. Mistress Joachim sat with her back to the light before a mahogany card table, holding a pack of playing cards in her hands. She was without a hat and her sculpturesque curls were caught in a knot and fell from it to her shoulders. She looked, without a hat, more mature, less European, a dark Demeter. Her eyes were dilated and fixed on the door as he came in; the hand holding a card was poised. They stared at each other for a full moment, till she exclaimed slowly and with contempt, ‘You would make a good thief!’ She turned her head from him and began to rearrange the bright cards as if he no longer existed.

‘I am accepting your invitation.’ He drew up a chair and seated himself across the table from her. ‘You cannot deny that you urged me to come.’

‘Or that you refused.’ Her voice was a murmur, husky, indifferent. Her cards held all her attention. As she turned up an unfavorable one she clicked her tongue in apparent annoyance.

He waited.

Finally she spoke without looking at him. ‘What has caused your change of heart — was it terror?'

‘Did you mean to alarm me dreadfully? Well, a man should never boast of any virtue till he is proven — least of all, courage.’

He folded his arms and cocked his head on one side, looking at her like an impertinent sparrow. She was controlling herself pretty well. Her large hands, well kept and covered with expensive rings, did not even shake. He would have to stir her up a bit to get any information from her.

‘And so you are the authoress of my anonymous letter! Perhaps it is a pity that I did not read it before you came — it might have prepared me for some things. But truly, Mistress Joachim, that letter — so naïve, so artlessly full of horrors — it was unworthy of you. You do not write as well as you talk; you should definitely abandon literature.’

She gave the cards an involuntary sharp slam, though her face lost none of its indifference.

‘I made a mistake in writing you,’ — her voice had no special intonation of bitterness, — ‘or in coming to see you. I am ready to admit it. God knows why I should care what happens to you! I suppose I came because of all I had heard of you, of your goodness to the poor and the unfortunate, your charities, your understanding. Some people, poor old women chiefly, seem to regard you as second only to the Saviour Himself.’ She turned up a card and stared at it. ‘It pleases some people to play the saviour to others; the more wretched, the blacker, those who are helped, the more bountiful, the more exalted, the whiter is the saviour. Is n’t that so?’

Father Kinkaid shrugged his shoulders.

‘But with me,’she continued, bitterness rising in her voice, ‘with me it is different. Me you come to insult. Because I have dragged myself out of the mud without your help, because I am rich and have power of a sort — more, perhaps, than you have.'

‘It is precisely your power that I have come to talk about, Mistress Joachim. You do not know what a dangerous thing it is to have. It is a high explosive — you must use it cautiously. And let me tell you one thing, apropos of this power you boast of: it consists first of all of money that you have extracted from white men. If you will forgive my saying so, whatever charm or beauty you have comes from white men also. I believe everything which you count as power is due in some measure, greater or smaller, to them. Do you think it is fair to use these things to stir up ignorant black people against us? I say it is above all unfair; but, secondly, it is a futile and stupid gesture, for you injure the whites not too much, while in the end the blacks suffer immeasurably.'

Mistress Joachim reshuffled the pack with fingers which were agitated enough to spill a few cards.

‘It has never been recorded that the victims of violence approved of it.’

‘Probably not, but you cannot base an argument for violence exclusively on that fact. The real truth is that it gets you nowhere.'

‘The French Revolution/ murmured Mistress Joachim.

‘Oh, come, come,’cried Father Kinkaid, ‘pray spare me the French Revolution! It is so tiresome to talk to people who do not think for themselves, but forever quote clichés they have gathered from someone else. I recognize here the words of your friend the poet, Monsieur Dumenisl, even though I have never spoken to him. He is a Haitian. Where did his revolution get him? Has he told you that? He prefers not to live in Haiti. Let us consider your own case. What do you expect from this? When your connection with it is known, you will be fined to the full limit of your properties. You will probably spend ten years in jail and emerge an old woman. Where will your power be then?’

‘You cannot frighten me,’she interrupted him. ‘I know you are talking to save your skin.'

He disregarded her. ‘In another moment,’he continued, ’you will speak to me about the wrongs of your race, or, say, part of your race — slavery and all of that. My dear woman, the injuries done your race and the good done it are universal, the experience of all of us. What are a few hundred years of slavery as against what you have received? Think of yourself here now, and a kraal in Africa. What a long way you have come! Slavery was a steppingstone, one among many. Because of a difference in color, you people imagine that everything which happens to you has a special and awful significance. All of it has happened also to us. How many bankers do you suppose are the descendants of feudal serfs?’

Her eyes wavered, but she repeated obstinately, ‘You are talking to save your skin.'

‘I am talking to save your soul, Mistress Joachim, and you realize it. You realized without my help that it was in danger or you would not have come to me in the first place. Do not plunge yourself back into the mud you spoke of. You have climbed far, and all credit to you for it. Climb further still. You are on a perilous rung of the ladder. You are thinking of wrongs and injuries you have received, not thinking of the good. But for God’s sake control yourself now if ever. Make the civilized, the Christian act of faith, and hang on to the rung. Climb higher.’

Suddenly she burst into tears and dropped her head forward on her arms. Though he had hoped to disturb her calm, he was a bit disconcerted as he watched the top of her head and listened to her violent sobbing. At last the sobs passed into long-drawn sighs. She raised her head and he was astonished at the sudden beauty of her eyes, moist and glistening with tears — astonished more, and uneasy, that their beauty should trouble him.

‘Father,’ she said unexpectedly, ‘when you were in Charlotte Amalie did you ever see my mother?’ She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief and frankly blew her nose like a child after tears. All of her face had changed — it was younger, gentle, almost stupid.

‘She was cook for Mistress Petersen, the harbor master’s wife. She was such a pretty woman, and a very religious one. She used to put lard on her hands every night to keep them soft.’

Mistress Joachim leaned back in her chair, her eyes still tear-filled, fixed heavily on Father Kinkaid. He felt her slipping through his grasp again.

The sun had set and the sky was afire behind her head; only bright surfaces in the room shone out of the swarming dusty darkness — brass, crystal, polished wood, and Mistress Joachim’s eyes in her shadowed face. ‘There were two things she always said to me, once, every day at least. One was “Pray, Talie, pray, and one day you will see the heavens rolling back like a shining scroll.” ’

‘And the other?’ he asked.

She looked up at him. Even in the gloom he sensed bitterness and an irony that flashed for all her placidity.

‘The other was “Wear your hat, Talie, or you ’ll get so burned people will think you are black.”’

A clock on one of her console tables struck once. It was six-thirty. In a half hour it would be dark. He leaned toward her.

‘Mistress Joachim, what is going to happen to-night and what can we do to prevent it?’

‘It is too late,’ she said softly. She had withdrawn herself from any concern over the moment. She might be almost going off to sleep.

‘Not too late,’ he urged. ‘Tell me what it is.’

She answered, ‘The laborers of thewhole island are rising. By morning there won’t be a sugar mill or a great house or a white man left on the island.’

Horses’ hoofs sounded in the soft dirt of the street outside. They stopped in front of the house. Someone knocked on the door. He heard the steps of the butler going down the hall. He peered forward into her face, but it was emptied idiotically of all expression. One hand lay loosely on the table. The front door banged shut; voices came from below. Someone was mounting the stairs.

‘ Come now. ’ He gripped her relaxed hand. It was like ice. ‘You know what we can do. Tell me.’

She looked suddenly down at his hand gripping hers. ‘Oh, I am in torment!’ She sighed painfully. ‘Why did you come?’

She tried to stand, but he dragged her back by the hand. She let herself be pulled forward, collapsing suddenly with both arms spread across the table. The newcomer was in the door.

‘You are tired,’ Father Kinkaid said clearly, to explain the abandonment of her attitude.

Her voice rang through the room with unexpected loudness, as if voicing the final word of despair: ‘I am in love! ’

Father Kinkaid turned to the man in the doorway. ‘Not with Monsieur Dumenisl, I hope,’ he said pleasantly.

The Haitian poet stepped into the room. He was a fat man, fatter even than Father Kinkaid remembered, with a Cape jasmine in his buttonhole and pomaded, crinkly hair.

‘Am I early?’ he asked hurriedly in a nervous, sputtering voice. ‘Do I perhaps intrude?’

As he came closer Father Kinkaid saw that he was in a flutter of rage. He was like an enraged fowl. It was difficult not to smile at him. Mistress Joachim was indifferent to his presence, perhaps unconscious of it; she did not lift her head from her arm.

‘Do I perhaps intrude?’ he repeated, his eyes bulging at Father Kinkaid as if they demanded some explanation from him. ‘Am I perhaps indiscreet?’

‘The poetic license,’ Father Kinkaid assured him, reaching for his hat under the chair. ‘As a matter of fact, Madame and I were just going out for a breath of air. You will excuse us, I am sure.’

The poet, balanced absurdly on the balls of his feet, swayed back and forth. He looked from Father Kinkaid to the bowed head of Mistress Joachim. ‘But, Madame,’ he protested, ‘your dinner — your guests — the little matter we had in hand — surely — ’ Suddenly he lost control. He shouted, ‘Have you lost your mind?’

‘He is so fat,’ thought Father Kinkaid, ‘that if we come to blows I don’t see what I could do to him. He would probably fall on me for a starter.’

He turned to the bowed head on the table, unresponsive as a bronze idol of Benin.

‘Well, what about it? Are you coming?’

She rose hastily. She seemed to have come to life with a jerk, and in a surprisingly clear voice said, ‘My shawl?’

He took it from the back of her chair and dropped it about her massive shoulders. Then, taking her arm, he set her in motion, as one releases a boat from the shore. She looked ahead of her, at neither of them, but Dumenisl moved forward, swayed rather, and clutched at her arm.

’Natalie — you — you — ’ he choked.

But with one thrust of her arm, a thrust somehow startlingly ferocious, she threw him aside. He reeled backward, and she and Father Kinkaid left the room together.

In the hall below, the butler was standing. He had been looking anxiously upward, wondering perhaps if he should interfere.

‘Wait,’ said Father Kinkaid. He tore a leaf from a notebook he carried, scribbled on it, and folded it up. ‘Take this down to the fort to the Commandant. Be quick about it. Run!’

The butler was looking at his mistress; she was staring ahead of her out of the doorway.

‘Tell him,’ said Father Kinkaid,

She turned. ‘If you fail to do as you are told — ’ she said.

He made off in great haste.

III

Outside, in the twilight, the carriage of Monsieur Dumenisl was waiting. His initials were blazoned on the door; a lantern was lit by the coachman. There was no one visible up or down the street but the form of the retreating butler. Without even consulting each other they climbed in.

‘Drive first to Hannah’s Rest,’ said Father Kinkaid, ‘and drive fast.’

Presently they were in the open country, with the dim emptiness of cane fields on either side of them. The stars were coming out overhead. It was too dark to see anything but each other’s outline. Father Kinkaid could feel his fingers twitching.

‘Where does it start?’ he asked.

‘They will be starting now near King’s Hill; all the estates will blaze shortly. Then they will march on Frederiksted.’

‘Frederiksted will be all right. You saw the note I sent?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘ He is a weak and obstinate man.’

Unfortunately she was right. His fingers went on twitching.

‘I am going to warn each estate as we pass. Then when we catch up with the rioters — if there really are any — I shall speak to them. I count on your presence somewhat, but I know most of them. They have come to me for help at one time or another, and I have done what I could for them. I believe I can turn them back.’

‘Oh, do you!’ She lapsed into heavy silence.

They drove on, and in the darkening earth that held them, roofed over by a silent abyss of stars, it was impossible to think of danger. He even grew accustomed to the disordered clatter of their horse’s hoofs. As they turned in at Hannah’s Rest their furious pace brought the startled owner to the door. Father Kinkaid climbed out and drew him aside, out of earshot of the few negroes who stood about, knowing perhaps already what he had come to tell. He explained in whispers.

‘Warn all those near you, Camporico, Concordia, as far as Carlton. I must press on beyond. I left word at Frederiksted and they ’ll send out to the North End.’

He climbed back beside the dark shadow that was Mistress Joachim. She awaited him impassively, as though they were not both perhaps wrecking all she had striven for. Suddenly she said, ‘This morning I found a little image of myself on my doorstep. It was spattered with blood. That is why I knew I should have to die.’

‘Oh, please don’t,’ he murmured. He did not wish her to revert to savagery before his eyes. He felt that if she did so it might be more than his reason could endure.

‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘that we can wipe out a lifetime of sin in one moment, if that moment is great enough?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Don’t you know?’ she demanded, turning toward him.

‘You are terribly disconcerting.’ He smiled at her, hoping to recall her cherished attitude of a woman of the world. But, after staring at him for a moment, she began to talk to herself, native fashion, an indistinguishable murmur of words, shaking her head from time to time and sighing heavily.

At Golden Grove the owner urged them to turn back. ‘They will tear you piecemeal,’ he said. ’You are mad to try to stop them. Ride back as fast as you can gallop. I ’ll give you a fresh horse.’ He ignored the presence of Mistress Joachim; he knew well enough who she was.

‘Do you really think they’ll kill me?’ asked Father Kinkaid. ‘At any rate I’ve got to try. I’ve preached control to them daily for twelve years and this will be my swan song, apparently.’

They looked up to the hill, where a glow was gathering like moonrise. As they looked it sharpened to red, climbed higher. Then bells on estates ahead of them began to peal out, and for several minutes kept up a wild clangor. They stopped, began again, and, in the intervals between, the night was filled by a sound like the murmur in a hollow shell held to the ear.

Father Kinkaid and the planter looked at each other.

‘Well,’ said the planter.

‘I’d better go on,’ said Father Kinkaid.

‘If you change your mind there are horses in my stable.’ The planter swung up to the saddle and galloped off.

Their driver drove them slowly up the main road. A few carriages driven furiously and men on horseback passed them in the direction of Frederiksted. Father Kinkaid hailed those he recognized. Then they were alone again on the road, bright, now with the reflection from the red sky. He tried to prepare what he would say, but he knew that cool reason would not be listened to. He must be the priest robed in gold and tearing open before them the great scroll of Heaven.

He could not do it. He was not the priest of Mistress Joachim or of this people. He would speak his few words, he would reason a little, and they would swarm over him; but his last feeling would be not fear, not pity, not even forgiveness for them, but contempt. The driver was reluctant to go on; nevertheless he drove them, with some urging, toward King’s Hill. Then he stopped. The road was empty, but they were not alone—the night was filled now with flame, with sound, with menace. Father Kinkaid felt a purely physical shrinking of the flesh and nerves. He saw already in imagination distorted ape faces and cane bills running blood.

‘Drive up to the hill,’ he commanded. The harshness of his own voice surprised him. But Mistress Joachim caught his arm.

‘Wait. Don’t you hear that?’

‘I hear,’ be replied.

‘No, no. I mean behind us,’

He turned his head, listened.

‘There must be a horse coming our way.'

‘Yes, it is close.’ She clutched her shawl about her, tried to stumble out.

‘You are not going to get out?’ he demanded.

‘Yes, yes, at once. Come, let us not waste time.’ She was on the ground beside the carriage. She leaned toward him so that her face was directly below his and whispered, ‘It is Dumenisl. He will catch up with us.’

The vision of the fat poet galloping made him smile, though a bit uneasily.

‘Do not smile,’ she said between set teeth. ‘Do not dare to smile. He will be armed. Are you?’

‘Oh,’ he exclaimed slowly. ‘How extraordinary women are!’

That it should be she who would realize at once what Dumenisl would do — for of course the efficient, brutal directness of the action made it inevitable. And yet he had never once thought of it.

‘Get out,’she persisted. ‘Send the driver on. He will follow the carriage.’ Without wasting more precious time she turned to urge the driver. But he was sullen. After all he was Dumenisl’s.

Father Kinkaid got out reluctantly, feeling Smaller than ever, less protected with his feet on the ground. Suddenly Mistress Joachim stripped off her rings and handed them to the driver.

’Oh, really I can’t let you do that’ — but he knew he was ridiculous before her look of scorn answered him. The driver examined the rings, said something Father Kinkaid could not understand, and drove off slowly. They had barely time to reach the cane field before the horseman appeared. Just before them was a stone watch-house, dark and empty. They went under the low door and stood inside together quite still. There was a pungent odor of sugar from some near-by mill. It was stiflingly hot and mosquitoes swarmed about their heads. In the light from the burning cane fields they could see the solitary horseman. He was slowing up his fagged horse, sagging forward in the saddle and perhaps peering from right to left.

But Father Kinkaid could not be sure it was Dumenisl. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Is it he?’

‘It is he,’ she replied with conviction.

He could feel his hands twitching again. The noise had split now into separate, more significant sounds. It was very near.

‘When he passes,’ he said, ‘I will go out and meet them as they come. I’ll speak to them — with God’s help,’ for he no longer counted on Mistress Joachim or even on himself.

The rider passed behind a line of trees. Shortly he would be over the hill.

Father Kinkaid tried to think impersonally of the eternity now so close, of communion with God. He could think of nothing. Mistress Joachim stirred beside him. He turned to look at her; her eyes were dilated, her lips drawn back from her teeth. He touched her and found her rigid as stone. She was in ecstasy. In spite of himself he began to shudder. What had his world become? A mob of savages, a man bent on murdering him, and beside him a woman locked in a religious trance.

‘But,’ he told himself, ‘don’t forget God.’

He closed his eyes and tried to think of Him serenely, but with perfect faith.

A cry from Mistress Joachim made him open his eyes. In the doorway of the watch-house stood Dumenisl. He had crept up on them.

Father Kinkaid was thankful that he could not see his face.

‘So this is how one feels,’ he thought, ‘at the moment of death.’

There was a flash and a report which almost burst the narrow stone walls. He felt a sting like a knife prick high on his shoulder. Then a momentary vertigo blinded him, a great weight hurled against him, and another flash, another report. He was carried to his knees.

When he could see clearly the door was empty. He could hear a man running and, in the silence that followed, heavy breathing like a stricken animal.

He knew he must do something for Mistress Joachim. He realized how completely she had saved him, not only from the second bullet, but from the necessity of meeting the rioters, who would most certainly have slaughtered him. He half lifted her heavy weight from the floor. All her silk ruffles and shawls billowed over and entangled him, her loosened hair fell across his neck, her warm flesh smothered him. He felt drowned in her immense vitality, though in that moment he knew her to be dying. Warm blood, from whose wound he could not tell, streamed down his arms. He knew that in a moment he would faint, but he managed to lift her up.

Through the low doorway a rosy flame reached to the top of the hill, brightened and shot across the sky. Then smoke, fiery and voluptuously curling, mounted in columns like the twisted portals of a gateway.

‘Oh, look, Father!’

He could barely hear her voice.

‘Look!’ She raised one arm.

In his weakening consciousness he saw with her, for one moment of perfect accord, a troubled vision of the splendor of eternal cities; but as he slipped to the floor beside her he managed to deny himself even that final indulgence.