The slave ship
than at home in England, and in some ways it was better. A good many
ways, said some of them. It was not just heaven in Merry England
for poor men! But while all that was true, and while this especial
plantation had a name for an almost foolish kindness, and while the
Law, without wink or blink, doubled the caught runaway’s original
term of service, and while almost to a man runaways were caught and
returned--yet men ran away, men black and white ran away.
In much, with many, it was the very ease of the first step, the first
dozen steps. You were hewing, two and two together, at the edge of
the step-by-step retreating forest, on the one side stumps and fallen
trees and the broad light and the sound of axes and the ever-present
sense of masters and overseers and Monotony that had begun to gibber at
you--on the other the deep, deep forest, right beside you, whispering,
beckoning, “Come with me! I stretch afar, so far, away from all this!”
Or you transplanted or weeded or wormed or suckered or cut tobacco at
the edge of a huge swamp, and the reeds whispered, “Here is the little
path--you know it. Put down the hoe, slip in here! I will meet over
you and hide you. Tom and Dick will not tell. To-night you may make
the river _and find a boat_. You know there is deep forest on the
other side and a trail or something into Carolina.”
Men black or white sometimes went without forethought, without
intending to go, just because Freedom suddenly sang to them, or
Monotony lifted and clanked her chains. The first time David Scott went
he did that, and afterwards cursed himself for his improvidence.
Days, weeks, months. The first year. Into the second year.
Once, in the first six months, I was sent with a message from Barget
to Williams the head overseer, and not finding him, made bold to go on
to the great house where they said he was. There was a front door and
a back door, just as it is in Europe, so I went to the back and asked
a negro wench for news, and I was heard from a room to the right, and
a voice called to me to come in. Here, in his place of business and
a great armchair, sat Colonel Amory, and on a much lesser chair the
overseer, and at the back of the room, on a high stool before a desk
and a huge ledger, Gervase Morrison. I gave my message--three drunken
Indians had come across from their town and were making trouble--and
the overseer said that he would ride down and get them laid by the
heels, “If your honor has finished----?”
“Aye, go ahead, Williams.”
Williams departed, and David Scott made to follow him out of the room,
but was halted ere he got to the door.
“You’re the Jacobite. Would you like a morsel of news from home, man?
The _Sally_ has just brought London letters.”
Naturally I would, and he spread a letter and read me of how great
and good was King George and England, and the French were beaten and
London bells were ringing, while in Scotland the wild Highlanders were
being disarmed and forbidden to wear their ancient costume, and Stuart
Scotland generally was in course of “pacification.” “And that’s the
best thing that could happen to you, as you’ll be agreeing before you
die! What turned you the wrong way?”
“What turned you the ‘right’ way?” I asked. “Family and bringing up?
Perhaps neither way is just the path to glory.”
“You’ve got a dour way with you,” he answered. “But you’re pithy.” His
good nature was enormous. “Now that you’re here, would you like to see
the house?” So he condescended to show it to me, and I’ve known Scots
lairds do the same for a cotter.
It was a good, big house, fairly furnished, with silver in the dining
room, and some portraits and a spinet and books in a spacious parlor.
He gave me a single glass of wine in the dining room, and in the hall
he showed me a drawing of what on earth but a Scotch glen with beck
and mountain, and in the parlor a young woman in a flowered print gown
with her hair richly done was playing the spinet. She looked over her
shoulder and made a mouth and went on making music, and what should she
be playing but an auld Scots air named “The Four Maries”?
She did not speak to me, and when the master was done with me I went
away out of that house, and I cursed the Stuarts and the ways that men
are fooled in an ill world.
As I was walking a voice behind me called, and there was Gervase
Morrison, overtaking me. “I’ve got an hour and I’ll go with you a bit.
Rather a handsome place! Not much beside some English lords of the
land, but very creditable for a new country.”
I said, “He showed me over, and thought I would take the purest
pleasure in all that was his and not mine. The pleasure of
contemplating God and Heaven.--Skulls are so thick!”
“Granted. However, he’s not a bad sort.”
“No. Only stupid.”
“Oh, we’re mostly stupid when we get on top!”
We went on by locust trees in bloom and cedar trees. “Who put him on
top? Not himself, I’m thinking! If it’s the system of things, then it’s
a damned system!”
“You wanted to put James Stuart on top.”
“I don’t know if _I_ wanted to or not! I got caught. We all get
caught in a net. And something or somebody eats us.”
A small, black, land turtle lay on his back in our path, some urchin
having turned him over and left him there. Morrison stooped and turned
him correctly, and he put forth feet and a head and crept away. “The
system now. Systems interest me. I’m not blindly plunging against the
thing that hurts me, as you are. For one thing, I’m older. Then perhaps
I am slow-going like that tortoise and haven’t your consciousness
of pain.--The system. We must have--or we think we must--tobacco to
smoke and snuff. Or if it was not tobacco, it would be wheat or maize.
Farther south, sugar and rum. We must have them, or others like them.
We must eat and drink and be clothed and have desires fulfilled, like
the fireflies here for number. Well, there might be two ways. Everybody
might work, no man holding more acres than he and his family could
till. I work--my name for instance, being Robert Amory--and master my
son and my fine daughters. Everywhere workers. No exceptions. Helping
one another as is fit--combining to make work easier--taking counsel
to make it intelligent, to find better methods, save waste and so
forth--sifting the mind man into the mind place, and the hand man
into the hand place, but keeping neither there longer than he himself
showed it was his own. Probably a deal of our toil to-day would be
thrown overboard. When we had to make our own fantastic luxuries,
probably we’d begin to crack up the Stoics! We’d teach our pleasures to
hang on other boughs. No bad thing either! The whole’s worth trying,
sometimes I think, just from that point of view. What good there was
would be accessible to all. Nothing artificial in between. Not Law and
Custom shrieking, ‘You can’t’, when Common Sense is thundering that
you should. There would be no slaves nor servants. In short, it would
be Scriptural, ‘Be ye servants of one another, in honor preferring one
another.’ Something like that. All gaining by whatever each did. All
rising together. It’s a dream! Of course it presupposes that all would
try--even if not in quite the same degree. But each according to his
light. And those with most light would be very patient and sunny kind
with those who had less.”
“That’s a religious Society.”
“Yes. A religious Society.”
“What’s the other?”
“The other is what we’ve got.”
“Ha, yes!”
“The few with much, the many with little. The few doing about as
Colonel Amory is doing with the much. The many doing about as we
do with the little. And the few may go down into the many, and a
corresponding number of the many come up into the few--and there’s no
change that counts. So we spin around the sun.”
David Scott cursed the plantation and Virginia and the spinning
earth. “It isn’t worth the while,” said Morrison. “I am coming to the
conclusion that there’s a bare possibility that it’s in oneself. If
it’s not there, it’s nowhere.”
“What is?”
“Oh, God or salvation or wisdom, or whatever you call it!”
“I call it a Jack o’ Lantern,” said David Scott and thought of his next
runaway, and also of a quartern of rum that he had enticed out of the
hands of those Indians.
CHAPTER V
A quartern of rum, and if I got into trouble with Barget I got into
trouble, that was all! David Scott told himself a day of forgetting was
worth the price, but what he truly wanted was the rum. His body wanted
it, having learned to love the taste of it and the thrill of it in the
brain two years before. Wanted it headstrong and hot like a colt,--but
colts may be broken. David Scott did not break his soon enough, and it
turned to the deil’s side, miscalling it Nature and a man’s right. A
big, gaunt, red carle!
I hid the rum and drank it all in two days. I was working with Tom
Tripper at the Narrow Patch. The sun was not yet up, the river mist
heavy, the rows of huge-leaved plants ghostly gray at no distance, thin
as the pipe smoke they would eventually pass into.
“Where did you get it?” he asked and leaned on his hoe.
“That’s telling.”
“If I had a bottle, and I was in London, down by Paul’s, tell you what
I’d do! I’d drink it, little by little, all day, and then when it
was empty and night, down I’d go to river and drop it and myself in
together.”
“It’s empty for you now, and there’s the river, and night will come.”
He had a laugh like a kelpie’s: “No! Thames is your only river to drown
in.”
I worked dull and heavy-headed, but the work got done. I could work. I
could run and fight and read. I lusted to know life and the world, but
I liked not the part of it I was knowing. Months went by, and I did
not get any more rum that gave me gorgeous visions and expanded me to
thinking I had the world to turn and twist and toss and catch!
There dwelled a kind of beauty in Virginia. I was not insensible of it.
They said that under the setting sun it had green hills and mountains
like great walls and small, swift, bright streams. Here was naught of
that. But yet was beauty. I must see it and grant it, though palely and
grudgingly to what Great Nature should have! Morning was the divine
time, though evening, at sunset, and when the moon rose, or when it was
soft, deep blue around huge stars, and against the lower world played
ten thousand thousand fireflies, ran it close. For all the English
clearings of a hundred and twenty-five years, and for all the tiny
Indian clearings of unknown centuries, the forest yet cried, “Mine!
Mine!” It was a strange forest, beautiful in the spring and the summer
and the autumn and the winter, but with a sad beauty. The marshes
had the same, and the still creeks that wound among them, and the
monstrously wide, deeply moving tidal rivers. Mist from the fat land
and broad waters hung in the air and made all colors sheenlike and
melting.
I leaned against the tree I was hewing down, or I straightened from the
earth where I was setting, plant after plant, to the thousands, the wee
tobacco plants, and I saw that there was beauty though it would not
stay, though my heart went hot and sick again. But I had the gleam;
from my cradle I had that gleam.
And David Scott, servant for he could not guess how long on a Virginia
plantation, could not utterly forswear mirth, though the limmer and he
made great spaces between their meetings. But about once in so often
she came to me with the deil’s own slant about her!
When I ran away the second time and after two days and nights was
taken in a marsh twenty miles nearer the sea, Williams and his helpers
carried me before a justice of the peace and I was lashed. To serve
fourteen years and have twenty-nine lashes well laid on the bare
back--I sent for mirth that time, and she came with skirls of laughter.