The slave ship
lawyer, a divine, the travellers, Trevannion and myself were all. The
lawyer who was host had caught, it seems, at Trevannion’s suggestion
that I be included. The traveller to be honored and fed knowledge
might obtain something of value from the captain of a big slave ship
who was also a decent person, not a bear at table, nor one to disgust
with oaths and horrors of the Middle Passage--which last were largely
mythical anyway.
I did not err in these respects, but erred, I afterwards found, in
keeping silence. I never now discussed the slave trade save in precise
and immediate business talk, and Trevannion might have known it. I
never philosophized over it in company now, or speculated as to its
course and end, or questioned it, or praised, or blamed, or extenuated.
Something true in me held me back from that while I sailed the
_Janet_. So I sat a listener, or when I answered a direct question
answered it shortly, with the bald fact.
Rice, wheat, maize, tobacco and indigo culture, markets and prices--and
the German evidently making notes in his brain; the story of South
Carolina or of Charlestown, past, present and future; soil, forest,
remnant of Indians, back country where the red men still were
plentiful; the sea, trade with home, trade with the other colonies,
trade with the Indies; buccaneers and pirates, and it is certain we
would have a chapter on these; the Government, the Church, the Law;
Planting; the gentry and others, plantations and plantation labor--and
here we are at slavery and the river through the sea that feeds it from
Africa.
And here it was that Trevannion was eloquent and Captain David Scott
was not.
They were all eloquent, the planters, the merchants, the lawyer,
the clergyman, the agent, the traveller from New York who spoke of
the Negro house boy and coachman whom he owned, and the traveller
from Massachusetts who had shares in the _Amelia_, Captain
Jonathan Bolt of Salem, trading to Old Calabar. I knew the
_Amelia_.--Self-interest made them eloquent.
Self-interest!
Seated there, half listening to all that I had heard a hundred times
over, the word took hold of me. Self-interest. The King’s in his
palace, the Pope’s in Saint Peter, the richest man’s, the poorest
man’s. Bartram’s and mine and Colley’s; McNaughton, Olafson, Mr.
Godfrey North, Colonel Amory, Williams, Barget, Lace the factor and
Rathbone Lace. Black traders, black chiefs, black kings in Africa,
black men and women in the villages who betrayed and sold, and who when
their turn came around were themselves betrayed and sold. White men who
in thousands of ways did the same to white men. Over all the world,
black, white, red and yellow--self-interest. It rose from its throne in
me, that word, and went up and down in a darkened, vast hall, its face
in its hands, as I had wandered at My Fancy. What was interest? What
was self?
It was strange. I had been sitting there stolidly, wearily, and they
were all as so many wooden figures with parrot tongues.--Something
turned, slid, mounted. It was like a dewy morning in the glen at home,
in Scotland. Dew and the dawn, hush and tenderness. It was like that,
but in the world of the soul or spirit, not of the senses. I felt
compassion.
For a breathless second it flooded me--compassion and understanding.
Then it went, but it left its echo and its mark, its sign and seal.
I saw Earth a slave ship and the wake it made. I saw that the yoke was
of self, but not forever. I felt the god bound in the human self who
would one day be free--bound in me, bound in these, bound in those who
served the table. The room melted into sea and land, the rolling ball;
the minute, like a streamlet, crossed the beach and was in the ocean. I
sat there, and they did not notice increase of silence.
The party broke up with the Charlestown debonairness. Every one was
courteous to me, even though I had not aided them with an already
prepared and rosy light. The German said in parting, “You have a store,
I think, sir, but you will not open the door.”
Out under the stars with Trevannion he said, “You’re a big, picturesque
figure, Captain Scott, but you didn’t help out with much more than
that.”
I said, “Look at the stars!” And indeed the whole sky had to me a
strange, new aspect--strange, but not formidable; no, something to be
understood.
The next day, waking at dawn, the sense of the moment at the inn
breathed more faintly. But it was not gone; it was sunken in me. The
business of the day covered it over; by eve I thought that I had
forgotten it. That night I had ill dreams and woke in the morning in a
bitter mood. That I had ever understood, that I had ever been truly and
thoroughly compassionate, was unlikely indeed. Yet--yet--I _had_
been!
In four days the _Janet_ sailed. Charlestown harbor, the pleasant
town, the live oaks and the pines, the tower of Saint Michael’s church,
we left them all behind. The ship was clean, the ship was fair; we
experienced good weather. I could pace, pace, pace my deck in the day
or the night; I could take a book that sometimes I opened and sometimes
did not; I could talk with Olafson or Lisle or others. Olafson pleased
me. Once I asked him what he thought of the stars and he told me of a
vision he had had one night in the northern seas. He saw all the stars
tied together with moving cords, the color of lightning. “All tied
together, sir, and we with them.”
Walk, walk, walk the deck, as though it were the great upper hall at
My Fancy. Sit and brood and brood, as though poop deck or cabin were
the reef out to which I used to swim. I was unhappy--life frustrated,
bitter and weary, and that moment in Charlestown a dream.
When the Bahamas were half a day astern a sail upon the horizon drew
our eye. She increased, coming down upon us with power, having the
advantage of the wind and being built to sail. She was strange to me,
and, “I do not know her,” said Michaelson, who had been to and fro in
the Trades for thirty years. We knew well enough the particular danger
of these waters and we got the _Janet_ ready and stood to arms.
Twice before in my memory we had been chased, but more feebly than this
pirate promised. He came nearer and nearer, but I looked at the sky
which had been darkening for an hour. It was toward day close also. Up
and out went his flag.
“Black, sir!”
“That’s no news. Ready, gunners!”
She was on us now, a fast-sailing bark with pirate written over her
as slaver was written over us. She cut across our bows, swung to port
and gave us a broadside. We answered. A sea fight began. But the
heavens meant their own way this time. There burst with fierceness wind
and rain, lightning and thunder. We were driven apart, the pirate’s
foremast snapped; we left him with his wild wreckage and were gone,
running before a tempest. Night came on; in the middle of it the storm
vanished, leaving a heavy sea; in a dawn of piled clouds and purple
waters we saw no other ship than ourselves. The _Janet_ had some
damage that could be removed. One man was killed; two or three had
their hurts. The sea subsided, the wind came back to its steady, sweet
blowing.
But that very dawning, looking up to masthead, I had a vision--being
a Scot, being liable at times to _see_ things that were symbolic
or that were real in another order. What I saw this dawn was that we
were flying a black flag. The dawn sent a beaker of light and spilled
it against the outflowing web. It was black, it had upon it skull
and crossbones. It was there as plain as my hand--the _Janet’s_
flag. I turned cold, I shivered. It streamed there, fastened to our
mast, and behind it towered a purple cloud. I saw it--it was gone. And
then--the great strangeness--even as I grasped that it was gone and
that I had put it there, opened within me so quietly again that clear
depth of understanding--of understanding and compassion.
Seemingly it lasted no longer than a lightning flash, as it had done
in Charlestown. When it was gone, again I was unhappy, torn. The black
flag was not only upon the Guinea slaver--it was everywhere in life.
Days and nights, sun and stars, wind and warmth and the great sea, and
we came to Daga.
How many times had I come to Daga? I hardly knew. It seemed of me now,
of my flesh. This day that it rose before us was my thirty-seventh
birthday.
The _Janet_ hung in harbor a month. I did not drink with Rathbone
Lace, or go with him up to Oil Palm village. In the place of that he
and I quarrelled.
It was Markham the surgeon of whom I saw most. “Have you had any more
visions?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“There are a folk called mystics who have at times--or some of them
have--visions. It’s a well-known medical fact--which may or may not
mean a fact of Nature. I’ve now and then seen just a flash of that race
in you. It was in Bartram too.”
“Yes, it was. Both of us put a stone upon it.”
“For me,” he said, “I’ve a weary vision of Daga going on forever. A
world of Dagas. At any moment we see what we are and nothing else, and
if all our moments prove the same color----”
“If,” I said.
“There you go!” he answered. “Well, have you got your full number of
Negroes?”
In the month I had them and had them aboard--coast folk, hill folk,
mountain folk, river valley folk. I sailed from Daga.
That evening there was a great sunset. It flared and flamed, and it
cast light across upon Daga, all her whitened masonry. I saw her so,
then over all flowed the tropic night, and these eyes saw her no more.
I had aboard docile Negroes and no pest or particular sickness. It was
November, the best season for all our affairs. Day after day, day after
day, the old routine--week after week.
I woke in the middle of the night, or maybe past the middle. It was as
though a hand had been laid upon me, but when I sat up there was no
figure, but only Bartram’s cabin, star lighted. But I was awake as I
had never been before. I left my bed and sat upon the bench beneath the
window. The night was luminous, with a rushing, strong, warm wind, but
only my outer man noted that. I sat upon the bench and I was a boy at
school.
I will say as shortly as may be what I knew at last. I knew that God is
the Whole of us. I found myself and my neighbor there and we were One.
I found a greater Self--oh, a greater!--a SELF that left none out.
CHAPTER XXVIII
“So you quit the Trade!” said Trevannion. “Well, so long as I stay in
it, I’ll maintain it’s not so bad!”
“Yes, Trevannion. But one day you also will quit.”
“Perhaps, and perhaps not,” said Trevannion. “When you’ve fetched your
bread and butter so long this way it’s not easy to face getting it
another way. I’ve a family.”
“I know. It’s hard to know what to do.--Well, I’m giving the
_Janet_ back again.”
“I’m sorry! Men like you and Bartram who is dead keep us
going.--Hoggard is the most probable man.”
“There are better! If it were possible--Bartram loved the _Janet_.”
“I’ve heard you say you love her.”
“I do.”
“Then why leave her?”
“Ah, that, Trevannion, opens up so many things! But----”
“We _could_ give her to Carraway.”
“I’d prefer it--seeing that Olafson won’t budge from being mate.”
“Very good then,” he said. “I’ll do it.--And now may I ask what
_you_ are going to do?”
“I haven’t quite decided,” I said, and thanking him for his kindness
rose to take my leave.
“You’ve got, I’m glad to know, a good deal of money with us here.”
“Yes. Bartram’s will left me his savings, and I’ve saved a little
myself.”
“Then,” said Trevannion, “I sha’n’t worry about you. Money’s a great
lifeboat.”
“I should like,” I said, “to make the _Janet_ my home until
Carraway’s notified and comes aboard.”
“Why, of course!” he answered. “You’re Captain until then. It’ll be
about three days, I imagine. He’s eager.”