Читать книгу Lydia Bailey - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 11

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How these French refugees in America contrived to exist, I never understood. There was a bookstore in Philadelphia that had been started by the celebrated Moreau de St. Méry, the man who wrote the monumental book on the Negroes of the French part of San Domingo—the part known to the Negroes as Haiti; and wealthy Philadelphians often went to his shop to leave donations of clothes and hats and shoes and money, together with such things as bags of beans and potatoes and field-peas, and in cold weather sides of beef and pork, barrels of corned beef, and such-like. The person in charge of the shop would put these where anybody who wanted them could have them, so that the bookshop’s flavor was rather of groceries than of books; and the French, being an unduly proud people, not nearly so logical as generally supposed, would wait until nobody was looking; then help themselves to whatever they needed.

They all seemed to have a profound aversion to any sort of manual labor and to spend their days and nights in futile talk, most of it directed against the black rascals who had driven them from their homes. These same black rascals, if I understood correctly, had freely offered to allow any property owner to return to Haiti and resume possession of his property. But the Frenchmen were hesitant about accepting; the blacks, they insisted, couldn’t be trusted. So the refugees stayed on in Philadelphia, half starved, threadbare, cantankerous, idle, and the most garrulous lot of human beings who ever wore trousers.

M. Laboulaye, when I met him, proved to be kindness and affability itself. His recollection of the Kingfisher case, and of the other cases I mentioned, was at first hazy. He had, he said, undergone a great deal of mental distress at the hands of the villainous blacks who had seized power in San Domingo and replaced white men of ability and distinction (I’m quoting M. Laboulaye) with scoundrels of every shade externally, but universally black within. Thus his memory was apt to be at fault—an unhappy state of affairs that was complicated by his inability to afford cigars, which had always proved stimulating.

When I produced a cigar from my scanty stock, he was effusive with his thanks, but suggested that whenever I had occasion to buy cigars in the future I should let him know, inasmuch as he was acquainted with a man who knew a man who had access to certain vintage cigars from the Vuelta Abajo fields.

Rum, too, stimulated his memory. When I set out my bottle of Medford rum for him and he had taken a sip of it, he asked me earnestly if I’d ever sampled a true rum from Jérémie or Jacmel. Those, he said, were the finest rums in all the world, and if ever I had occasion to buy more rum, he strongly urged that I allow him to act as entrepreneur, since he knew a man who knew a man who had lived in Jacmel and would be happy to favor him with as much rum as I might need.

There was no question that his memory was favorably affected by the cigar and the rum, because little things about the Kingfisher case began to come back to his mind—how she had been captured by the French privateer Voltigeur, Captain Lombard, fitted out and owned at Curaçao. The papers relative to the vessel and her cargo had been secretly dispatched to Cap François and there placed before a Court of Commerce composed of three men of color, as Negroes with an admixture of white blood are always called in Haiti. M. Laboulaye had been particularly impressed by the case on account of the condemnation pretext. Usually American vessels captured by French naval vessels or French privateers were condemned because the seals on their clearance-papers were oval instead of square, or because it was alleged that the captain had failed to provide himself with a proper List of Seamen—an improper list, in French eyes, being one in which not all the names were fully spelled out. That was what had happened to the Catherine, owned by Anthony & Moses Davenport of Newburyport. But the Kingfisher had been condemned because her captors claimed to have found, among her papers, a letter in “hieroglyphic or other characters.” The key to the hieroglyphics had fortunately turned up at the same time, and it had been proved to the satisfaction of the three colored gentlemen that the hieroglyphics were in some way dangerous.

“In what way were they dangerous?” I asked M. Laboulaye.

“In the same way that the simplest things are consistently held to be dangerous in time of war. The hieroglyphics were meaningless; therefore they were dangerous—dangerous and secret! One could not speak of them, even! No, no! They were hurried into our archives, where nobody will find them, ever! And so the ship was ordered sold.”

“Did you protest?” I asked.

He looked at me wide-eyed. “Protest? I? My friend, you see me here, alive! Would I be alive if I had protested to a court composed of men of color? Aha! Figure to yourself! Protest? Never of the life!”

By following all of M. Laboulaye’s suggestions, and allowing him to get me the Vuelta Abajo cigars and the Jacmel rum, I found there was almost nothing he couldn’t recollect. Whenever his own memory failed, he went to acquaintances among the émigrés until he found someone who had kept a journal; and out of these journals he picked up many an addition to my store of knowledge on Spoliation Claims. Often he brought the owner of the diary back to call upon me, so that the diarist’s memory could also be refreshed with a little rum and a cigar.

All in all, I was immeasurably content during that spring and summer and autumn that I spent with William Bartram, for I was getting the evidence I needed, I was learning many new methods of farming and soil treatment from working with Bartram, and I was able to be of considerable help to him as well, which is always a satisfaction. What I couldn’t understand was why I could sit night after night before Lydia’s portrait and write letter after letter to Harriet Faulkner, without having more than a faint desire to leave Philadelphia.

One evening M. Laboulaye came to see me with a M. de Busigny, who had succeeded to the task of operating M. Moreau de St. Méry’s bookshop, now that the latter gentleman had returned to France; and the moment that M. de Busigny entered the room and saw the portrait of Lydia, he burst into a torrent of French and waved his arms excitedly at M. Laboulaye.

“My God, it is she! She that had the imagination, the verve!”

I thought the man an odd fish, but his excitement excited me.

M. de Busigny rapped M. Laboulaye upon the chest with his finger tips. “Hah, but there was a forceful one, forever urging upon us that we should help ourselves. I can hear her speaking to me now! ‘Why does nobody translate that book of M. Moreau de St. Méry’s?’ she would demand. ‘There never was such a book written about the Negroes of any country, and now look at all your countrymen, who speak English, yet sit here and talk and eat and make no move toward translating that book! What is the matter with your countrymen, Monsieur?’ she used to ask. ‘Do they care nothing for fame? Do they not appreciate the honor of translating a great book?’ “

Busigny turned to me suddenly. “She’s your friend, Monsieur? Your sister, perhaps? Your wife? For two years we have seen nothing whatever of her. She vanished—we never knew why, though she’d brought us gifts from time to time and practised her French upon us. Where is she, Monsieur?”

“I’m sorry to say she’s dead.”

“Ah,” M. de Busigny cried, “the poor little! So young! Look what happens! How this is life! Look at us, the best that Haiti has to offer, driven out, ejected, spewed forth! And now this poor little! She is dead!” He struck his forehead. “My God, but how the life is unfair! How did she die?”

“Yellow fever,” I said. “She went to Haiti to be a governess—for whom I don’t know—and she died of it there.”

M. de Busigny made commiserative clicking sounds with his tongue; and thereafter, whenever M. Laboulaye or any of his friends came to see me, they referred to Lydia’s portrait as “the poor little,” and reminded each other of kind things she had done in the days of M. Moreau de St. Méry, and how she had held up her end of a conversation with the great Talleyrand when he too was an habitué of Bartram’s Gardens and of M. Moreau de St. Méry’s bookshop.

Repeatedly I found myself on the verge of passing on to Harriet the pleasant things all these Frenchmen had to say about Lydia, and repeatedly I stopped myself when I recalled what Thomas Bailey had said—something to the effect that Harriet had never liked Lydia’s portrait because it reminded people of Harriet, and in a way not entirely flattering to Harriet.

This, then, was my situation in December of 1801, when M. Laboulaye came to see me, accompanied by an American sea captain, George Lee, of Philadelphia, who had been present in Cap François when the ship Three Brothers had been condemned and sold.

Captain Lee, M. Laboulaye had told me, made frequent trips to Haiti, doing little personal errands for Frenchmen who were unable to return to the island themselves.

Lee was a bluff, burly, hearty-looking man in a short blue jacket. A blue cap was perched rakishly on the side of his head, and I think I would have picked him out as a mariner at any distance or in any sort of crowd, not only because of the ruddiness of his face and the nautical cut of his clothes, but because of his swaggering, wide-legged gait.

He even brought a sort of harborside flavor into the room with him—a musty, tarry scent of soggy dock piling, sour mud, stale tobacco, rum dregs, and bilge. Mingled with these familiar odors was an elusive yet pungent trace of feminine perfume that came and went among those other coarser odors as a mouse might run between grain bags.

As he seized my hand and shook it, his eyes went over my shoulder to Lydia’s portrait. “Ho,” he said, “there’s a surprise! Who’d ever have thought I’d come across that face again so soon!”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Soon!” I cried. “What do you mean! You don’t mean that face!”

“Oh, I don’t, don’t I?” he said. “Well, mister, it beats hell the way things happen! I left Cap François only two weeks ago, and I saw that very girl the day before I sailed.”

My heart began to thump so that I could hardly speak. “That’s impossible,” I said. “She’s dead.”

He looked scornful. “Dead? Dead, hell! I don’t make mistakes about faces—not women’s faces. I saw that same face fourteen—no, fifteen ... What day of the week is this, anyway?”

“Wednesday.”

“Then it was sixteen days ago that I saw her, sitting at a sidewalk café in the Cap François Plaza. Having a cup of coffee, she was.”

“Alone?”

“Hell, no! She had two little bastards of boys with her, one on each side of her, stickying themselves up with sirop and water.”

“She’s alive,” I whispered. “Alive!” I could neither grasp it nor believe it. “You’re sure? Did you hear her speak?”

“Of course I heard her speak. Damn it, I hung around that table for half an hour hoping she’d look up and say howdy-do.”

“They were speaking English?”

“Of course they were speaking English! Why would I waste time listening to a girl who couldn’t speak anything but French?”

“Did you learn anything about her—where she lived, or with whom?”

Lee gave me a rueful look. “No, I didn’t! I tried, but she wasn’t a sociable sort. They’d come some distance, though. They all had on riding clothes.”

I did my best to think coherently. This man Lee didn’t look good to me; everything he said betrayed trickiness and unreliability. Yet I felt confident that he was telling the truth. He had seen Lydia Bailey; Lydia Bailey was alive. And if so, then Thomas Bailey had been mistaken in thinking her dead. I wondered how this could have happened. How could Thomas Bailey have been mistaken about his own niece? If she was alive, she would have continued to write to him, and he’d have known she wasn’t dead.

“By God,” I thought, “Lydia would have been Bailey’s heir if she hadn’t died! And she didn’t die! Harriet made up her mind that she wanted to be Bailey’s heir, and there was only one way for her to do it! Harriet’s to blame!”

I went to the closet and with shaking hands took from my portmanteau the little case in which I carried Lydia’s picture.

M. Laboulaye protested. “I believe Captain Lee has information that will be valuable to you in the Three Brothers case.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll take it down.”

I went back to the cupboard for my remaining cigars and my last bottles of Jacmel rum. “Accept, my dear M. Laboulaye, these small tokens of my gratitude and affection. Thanks to you, all my Spoliation Claims are as complete as it’s possible to make them. I’ll give you a list of the ships, and if you discover anything else about them, I’ll be grateful if you’ll write to my uncle, Colonel William Tyng of Portland, in whose hands I’m leaving all the cases. You’ll find he’ll be grateful—as I’ll be when I return from Haiti.”

“From Haiti!” Laboulaye exclaimed. “But you cannot go to Haiti! To travel about there is dangerous!”

“Then it’s equally dangerous for that lady in the portrait to be there!” I reminded him. “In any case, I’ve just learned something about her that makes it necessary for me to see her.” I turned to Lee. “You’re sure it was the one in the portrait that you saw?”

Lee laughed. “You can’t fool George Lee on a pretty woman’s face! One look and I can give you the exact measurements, all over!”

“And would you be willing to sail me to Boston and Portland first; then to Haiti?”

“Why not?” Lee asked. “Make it twenty dollars extra and I’ll take you to Halifax! Just name your sailing date and I’m at your service.”

“Dawn,” I said. “We’ll sail for Boston at dawn tomorrow.”

Bartram, when he heard my news, was as excited as I. “If only I were younger,” he kept repeating, “I’d go myself! There’s nothing like it! Unknown places—unknown people—unknown customs—unknown birds and shrubs and flowers! Ah!” He sighed ecstatically.

“These Frenchmen,” I said, “say that no white man can travel in Haiti without being in danger.”

“Pah!” Bartram cried. “That’s what every stay-at-home thinks. You can travel anywhere on earth in perfect safety if you keep a smile on your face and act like a decent human being!”

When I undertook to tell him some of the other discouraging things M. Laboulaye had said about traveling in Haiti, he wouldn’t listen. “All those Frenchmen,” he said, “are lazy, shiftless, helpless, ruined by slavery. They’d never been anywhere or seen anything. That’s why they’re here, why they were driven from their homes—because they and their kind were unable to understand what was happening around them.” He held to the lapel of my coat and spoke earnestly. “Some years ago I had occasion to make a trip through the Indian sections of the Carolinas and Eastern Florida. When my friends heard my plans, they were distressed. They’d never seen a Cherokee, but they knew! Oh, yes: they knew! If I tried to cross the mountains among which the Cherokees lived, I’d die of starvation and exposure! The Cherokees were savage and warlike, and I’d be tortured, scalped, and killed before I’d been gone a week! Horrible! When I went right ahead with my preparations, they were sure I was crazy.”

He patted my arm. “Be friendly, and everyone you meet will be friendly. There’s too much suspicion in this world—too many people who have never learned how to smile and understand other men.”

When I tried to thank him for all he’d done, he was impatient. “You’ll need funds to make such a trip. Do you have enough?”

I said I thought so.

“You’ve got to know,” Bartram said. “You’ve got to have enough to buy presents to take along.”

“What sort of presents?”

“Anything at all—anything to give you confidence—anything that’ll please simple people.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know about that. I haven’t much time. I can’t waste any of it buying presents.”

Bartram looked exasperated, then lumbered from the room. When he returned he brought with him four small circular packages, small cartwheels fifteen inches in diameter.

He handed me one of the cartwheels. “I’d been wondering what to do with these. I got ’em years ago, thinking I’d use ’em to travel among the Indians of Mexico. The very best French gold braid, Albion, and an Indian or a Negro would sell his soul for a yard of it. Take it, my boy, and pay me back by finding some new seeds for the Garden. You’ll find Haiti full of ’em!”

He wouldn’t take no for an answer—and I’ve often thought that if the rulers and presidents and governors of this world could have half of William Bartram’s understanding, his desire to improve his own surroundings at no cost to others, his knowledge of the fundamental decency of the small people of every land, his eagerness to learn, there’d be an end to hatred between nations—and an end to wars.