Crescent City (29 page)

Eugene was not at home. He had left no message; he never did; where he had gone was understood. The bank’s letter would have to wait until the morning. She went to her room to read it again, then opened the
Daily Delta.

At once the name Pontalba caught her attention, followed by something about “an intelligent expression” and “energetic movements.” So Miriam read rapidly.

Miriam laid the paper aside.

“The support of their dependent families,” she repeated aloud. “Their feminine reserve,” she said, frowning a little. “A proper businesslike style.”

She stood up and began to undress, thinking all the while about the baroness. In the tall glass she watched her dress fall to the floor, then the white muslin petticoat, the pleated horsehair petticoat, then a corded calico skirt, the crinoline, and finally the winter flannel petticoat. And remembering the pantaloons, it came to
her that there was something humorous about all this clothing. One couldn’t very well climb a ladder in these things, could one? Of course, she had no need to climb a ladder, but—

She picked up the paper again, eagerly reading: “Energetic ladies thrown upon their own resources …” Something ran up and down her spine, light fingers of excitement and fear.

Your children have you,
Gabriel had said.

I will teach you,
he had said.

Why not?

In the morning she went to Eugene. He was sitting in his wing chair holding a small object, turning it over as if to see it with his fingers. Hearing her come in, he placed it carefully on the table, and she saw what it was: a tawny clay figurine, painted and glazed, a recumbent lion.

“That’s very good, Eugene.” For a moment she hesitated before questioning gently, “Is it—the boy’s?”

He nodded.

“The color is perfect, a kind of sandy gold.”

She saw that, for whatever reason, he did not welcome the subject. And she thought she understood the complexity, the sad confusion, of his feelings.

“I have a letter from the bank,” she said then. “I’ll read it to you.”

“They sent a letter to you?”

“They sent it to your manager, Mr. Scofield, and I took it from his desk. No, listen to me before you explode. Listen to me.”

When Miriam had read the letter, Eugene was silent. Shock and humiliation washed over his tired face. But most of all what one saw was a weary, gray indifference.

So the course lay plain before her.

“Now will you give me permission to work? I will
do nothing without the advice of Gabriel Carvalho. I will learn what I need to know, as once I had to learn to speak your languages here. Now will you give it to me?”

His silence was assent.

Presently, he got up. “Get the carriage for me. I’m going out.”

“The carriage is already waiting. You will be going to Queen, then?”

Eugene turned toward her without answering. She saw his cheek twitch.

“It’s all right, Eugene! Don’t you think I know you still go there?”

She followed him to the hall, where Sisyphus waited to help him down the stairs.

“Please tell Maxim,” she instructed Sisyphus, “to take Mr. Mendes to the house on Chartres Street where he always goes. And to wait for him if he wishes.”

The instruction was certainly superfluous, since the routine was always the same. But it was a fine relief to say aloud what had been secret. Oh, it would give them something to gossip about in the kitchen! She felt some pride in being able to acknowledge freely what other people might construe as a humiliation. In the public acknowledgment of this thing it ceased to be a humiliation.

Besides, she had more important things to think about now.

The city was barely awake when David turned his horse eastward into the gorgeous morning light. Lucien followed at the customary respectful master-servant distance, and the two horses moved at a nice trot. David’s medical kit was slung over the saddle horn, and his pistols hung heavily from his belt. Having never in his life carried a weapon, he was acutely aware of them, and would not have had them if Lucien had not refused to accompany him again unless he was armed.

Arms, however, attracted no attention. A southern gentleman was expected to carry a pistol or a dirk or both. A violent people under the surface of courtesy, David reflected now, as he rode past the dueling oaks behind the cathedral where, only last week, he had been summoned to help two handsome boys who had shot each other to death in a silly argument about an actress. Not more than eighteen, they had been, when their blood had gushed away into the ground.

Lucien was apprehensive today. He “felt things in his bones.” David, however, had no reason to think that today’s meetings were going to be any different from the usual. First to come was a leader’s policy meeting under the guise of a social celebration at an inn. Then, in the evening, the gathering with Negro
leaders in the swamp hideout would be held. In neither place was there any need for weapons.

Weapons had never been what he wanted, anyway. Words and ideas were always far more potent, for in the end there was no defense against ideas.

Certainly things were coming to a head now in the political area. The Whig party was moribund and the burgeoning new Republican party was spreading through the North. More and more the slave power was having to defend itself. Defend itself! How, for instance, a man like Judah Benjamin could stand up in the United States Senate and speak as he did, David would never understand! Slaves are property, he says; there is no right in law to rob a man of his property. Well, Charles Sumner might call Benjamin the most brilliant orator in the Senate, and he might well be, but oratory and elegant manners have nothing to do with morality. For a Jew to talk like that! Not that Benjamin was much of a Jew!

Yet David supposed a Jew had as much right as anyone to be wrong. Even the rabbis, like the clergy of every other denomination, were in disagreement among themselves these days.

Up in New York Rabbi Raphall quoted Exodus as authority for slavery. Oh, says the rabbi, he himself is not a slave owner, but it is certainly not forbidden to own slaves, provided that one treats them with dignity and kindness. His sermon is praised and quoted throughout the South.

In vehement rebuttal, Rabbi Einhorn of Baltimore replies: It is the essence of the Bible that we must follow, not its primitive customs. Of course slavery is mentioned there, as were polygamy and royalty, both of which have been abolished in the United States!

Now, as they crossed the city line, the horses’ hooves struck quietly on sandy ground. The autumn
air was warm at David’s back and cool on his face. Ahead of him the road ran to the railroad tracks and beyond. At the crossing he reined the horse in and stood a moment observing the double black gleam of the tracks. There was direct service now all the way to New York. A frown turned the lines on his forehead into furrows.

Lucien rode up to him. “You’d never make it,” he said softly. “You’d be caught at the next station. Boat’s the only way, I keep telling you.”

“I’m not going to be caught.”

“Let us hope not.”

Fear trickled through his veins. It felt cold. Any man who says he can face a painful death without fear is a liar. I am terribly afraid, he told himself.

Yet there was something stronger than fear within him, a hatred of the enemy—the system, not the men who ran it—so powerful that it seemed as if the system would have to weaken in the face of such hatred; weaken, rot, and die before he himself could die.

His frown deepened. He clucked to the horse and called back to Lucien.

“Come on, let’s move, we’ve a long day.”

Out of the swampland rose a mist so heavy that, in spite of the moonlight, only the innermost ring of trees could be seen from the spot where David halted. Beyond lay the jungle night. A constant dripping from the trees came steadily, like drums or marching feet.

“Draw the cloak collar up around your face,” Lucien advised.

“Will you stop whispering? I can’t hear you,” David demanded irritably. With nerves on edge, he was impatient.

Now Lucien was impatient. “I said, cover your face
up to the eyes and pull the hat down. You must not be recognized. Don’t you understand that yet?”

“Thank God it’s chilly, then,” David grumbled. He strained to see into the blackness, but a rolling mist still screened it.

“This place reminds me of—” he began, and stopped, having been about to say something about Macbeth’s witches, before remembering that the remark would have no significance for Lucien.

“I haven’t the slightest idea where the road is,” he complained. “Are you sure you know where we’re going?”

“Have faith. Another five minutes’ walk and we’ll be there.”

Soon their feet caught in a soggy muck, so that each step became a struggle against a strong downward suction.

“Sorry,” Lucien apologized. “But the wetter it is, the better to foil the dogs. They can follow a dry trail for five miles or more, with enough strength left at the end of it to tear a man apart.”

“I still don’t know how you know where you are.”

“Oh, you get to recognize your landmarks. My brother lived in the cypress swamp for three years after he ran away. He and a band of twenty used to raid the plantations at night for food.”

“You never told me.”

“I didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Is he in the group we’re seeing tonight?”

“No. He was hanged.” And as David had no comment to that, Lucien continued, “An abolitionist from Illinois got them into a big group, maybe two thousand Negroes, making cartridges and other ammunition. But the vigilantes found out. That’s the trouble when the group’s too big. There’s bound to be somebody who talks too much—Stop! Listen!”

A muffled, stealthy swishing of foliage being carefully moved aside came from the left. The two men waited. A moment later a smudge of light emerged from the trees, like moonglow behind clouds, revealing first a lantern, then the man who held it, and finally a circle of ten men, each with his weak light, together making a pool of light in the cramped clearing.

Lucien held his arm up in greeting. “Listen. I’ve brought someone to talk to you tonight. Don’t ask who he is. You don’t need to know. He’s a friend. That’s enough. He wouldn’t be here otherwise, because it’s a great risk and you all know it. I tried to talk him out of coming, but he wanted to come. Draw in closer.”

In total silence the men obeyed. David was ringed with ghostly white teeth and eyewhites glistening out of blackness.

“Where are the horses?” Lucien asked.

A man answered. “Two good horses, rested and saddled. Right there behind those trees.”

“Horses?” David inquired.

“For us. For you if there’s need. See where I’m pointing? Go directly south. In less than a mile you’ll reach the road. Turn right onto it and from there it’s straight to the city line.”

“But,” David objected, “what about our horses in the hotel stable?”

“Please. If there’s any trouble you’ll have to get out of here fast,” Lucien warned. “Listen to me. You’ll go the way I just told you. I’ve got another route for myself. It’s safer like that. You understand?”

David nodded. Tonight, it seemed, the servant and master had exchanged places.

“I understand,” he said somberly.

“All right. Now begin.”

David stepped forward. “I’ve come to you because I
have the same wish you have, to make life better for you and for us all.”

No one moved. His little speech, which he had not prepared beforehand, came without effort, came naturally and truthfully from the heart.

“Sometimes it must seem to you that the changes we seek will never come, or at least not soon enough for you who are alive today to get any benefit from them.”

Someone shifted a lantern, splashing light upward, so that there fell into David’s line of vision an old man’s tender face, bright with worshipful concentration. This, finally, is my meeting with reality, he thought, with brave flesh and vulnerable bones. All things before this were only plans and talk, philosophy and paper. Yet at the same time he was standing outside of this reality, observing himself here in the eerie night, an actor in a fantastic dream.

“If thousands of you should refuse to work for anything but wages, which would of course mean freedom, that would mean winning without violence.”

He paused. Dark as it was, he could sense the instant stiffening of bodies, could sense the tilted heads, the listening. The hair on his forearms prickled.

A dog barked; the signal smashed the waiting stillness. Almost at once the stillness exploded with a violent crash of hooves, and the clamor of voices.

The circle broke. In frenzy the men dropped their lanterns, scattering themselves in the shelter of the underbrush. A moment later half a dozen men on horseback waving torches and pistols plunged through the trees; crows, startled out of their rest, cawed and flapped; horses neighed; the woods came awake.

Lucien and David stared at one another as if questioning their own senses, as if dazed.

Then, “For Christ’s sakes, run!” Lucien cried. “Go!”

Rearing horses went wild. The huge animals, quivering under the whip and the terror, trampled through the underbrush.

“Run!” Lucien screamed again. “David! To the road!”

A horse wheeled across David’s path. “David!” the rider cried. “So it’s David! You”—he raised a pistol—“you scum!”

Out of the torchlight blazed the furious eyes of Sylvain Labouisse.
Hate! Kill!
said the mad eyes. David drew his pistol. Sylvain’s shot splattered in the leafage over David’s head, while his own shot knocked Sylvain out of the saddle.

“Go!” screamed Lucien. “He recognized you.”

David swung up onto Sylvain’s horse. “Lucien, get to my sister’s or to Gabriel Carvalho, either one, I’ll need money. I don’t want them mixed up in this, just some money!” And he spurred the horse into the swamp.