Do
the moutains wear black for the death of a bee in the old world? Not
so in the new. Perhaps Ardennes wept over the “unreturning brave”,
but I saw death ride naked on a tropic shore and his breath never
darkened the water nor brushed the sky; nature's children drowned,
curdled the water in their blood, while she painted her cheeks,
wreathed in smiles, and the hills sparked with jollity by the pacific
sea.
I
lived in Avallon, a waterside village in the seaport. A woman in the
district was divorced for adultery. Her husband was a cabinet
minister, a rich man, coarse, luxurious, and trynnical. Public
opinion was bitter against his wife because she had left his house
and gone to live with her lover and it was proved that because they
were poor, she had slept with her two children nightly in her lover's
bed. The children had to appear in court and give this evidence. The
father renounced these children, who he declared were not of his
blood, and he left all three in great poverty: this was not
condemned, for a woman who forsakes wealth for poverty is obviously
poor-spirited, and beneath commiseration: even the poor despised her.
The
son was ten years old, the daughter was fourteen. I knew her, her
name was Viola. She was pretty, but thin, with long black hair, and
rather smart with her tongue. Certainly she suffered in such an
honest city, where the “Decameron” was forbidden, and England's
colonial history is expurgated for the school books.
I
saw her mother once, a pretty, dark, sweet woman, who ventured
timidly into the ladies cabin on the ferry and looked quickly but
without expectation of greeting at the female faces decorating the
walls. When I raised my hat to her she smiled with pleasure, but with
indulgence also; she knew I pitied her, but she regarded us all very
calmly from another world. The ladies were indignant that she
continued to live in our district. “She would have at least the
delicacy to go where she is not known,” said my maiden aunt.
Society, great beast of tender skin, blind with elephant ears, fell
indigent, lashed its little tail and got hot round the rump. It
required a sacrifice, and when Jumbo wants something the god
themselves obey.
One
Wednesday afternoon, the four o'clock ferry, which carried the school
children home from tow, was struck amidships by an ocean liner and
sank immediately, carrying down more than fifty souls. Thirty
children were drowned, and all those who died were from our village
of Avallon. I went down to catch the four-thirty ferry and saw the
stretchers with bodies brought in already by the rescuers. All the
way home, with my book on the seat, lifebouys and splinterd wood rose
up into the bays and rivers. Eddies of soot and oil floated past. In
a few minutes we reached the spot where the ferry lay with her
passengers, and I felt paralyzed with a strange and almost
voluptuous cramp, and my spirit being wound out of me like a djinn
out of a pot. We went dead slow, with our flag at halfmast, and there
was a silence on the boat. I thought of those people sitting below,
almost living, with a glow on their cheeks still through the green
gloom of the deep water channel; they seemed a company that had gone
apart for some conclave. I believe my two young sisters were there,
waiting for me with open eyes, and I wanted to dive in, but I could
not move. When we neared home I saw my little brother running and
jumping on our lawn, so I was reassured.
After
a few days, when the last rumours and hoped had died out, and the
whole village was in mourning, in the lovely weather, only one piece
of fantasy remained. Viola alone had not been found. She must have
been carried, or been lost in the deeper mud at the bottom; the ferry
itself had moved several hundred feet. It seemed to my mother and
aunt that this was the “judgement of God” though for what mortal
sins the other bereaved women had been punished, no one thought to
conjecture.
At
the end of the week Viola was found on one end of the wreck, standing
upright, uninjured, her right foot simply entangled in a rope. The
founts of pitty at this word broek the seadl and jettled in each
breast, and everyone that night had before his eys the image of Viola
standing in the green gloon for a week, upright, looking for the
rescuers, astonished that they did not come for her, perhaps with a
lively word in her lips at ther slowness, and then prisoned by her
poor weak foot, decaying, but with her arms still floating up; a
watermaiden tangled in a lily-food, and not able to reach the
surface. I cried and thought how she died in that attitude to ask
pity.
In
fact, it turned out that wat, or at least, if the church and justice
were not moved, for they should be above the frailties of fresh and
blood, the women began to lament on her mother's account, to say she
was well punished and one could even pity er. The beast was appeased,
as in ancient days, by the sacrifice of a virgin.
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