The Victim Of His Vision

The room was fairly large, with two windows screened but unglazed; a canvas cot stood in one corner, a packing-box table and a decrepit chair in another. Like the kitchen it was surprisingly clean. He returned to his hostess, who showed no anxiety about his intentions.

"How much by the week?" he asked.

"Eight gourdes."

"And you will feed me for how much?"

"Fifteen gourdes."

"I will take it." He forced himself to decision again; had he hesitated he knew he would have gone elsewhere. The price also--less than four dollars gold--attracted him, and he could doubtless buy some furniture in the town. Moreover, experienced missionaries who had talked before the board had always emphasized the value of living among the natives.

"B'en," said the negress. She rose and emptied the remains from her plate into a tin pail, sponging the plate with a piece of bread.

"I have a trunk on the steamer," said Simpson. "The boy--can he----"

"He will go with you," the negress interrupted.

The cripple slid from his chair, scraped his plate and Simpson's, put on his battered straw hat, and shambled into the yard. Simpson followed.

He turned at the gate and looked back. The child had toddled to the door and was standing there, holding on to the door-post. Inside, the shadow of the woman flickered across the close bars of bamboo.

II

Bunsen was standing on the jetty when they reached it talking excitedly with a tall bowed man of fifty or so whose complexion showed the stippled pallor of long residence in the tropics.

"Here he is now!" Bunsen exclaimed as Simpson approached. "I was just getting anxious about you. Stopped at the hotel--you hadn't been there, they said. Port au Prince is a bad place to get lost in. Oh--this gentleman is our consul. Mr. Witherbee--Mr. Simpson."

Simpson shook hands. Witherbee's face was just a pair of dull eyes behind a ragged moustache, but there was unusual vigour in his grip.

"I'll see a lot of you, if you stay long," he said. He looked at Simpson more closely. "At least, I hope so. But where have you been? I was getting as anxious as Mr. Bunsen--afraid you'd been sacrificed to the snake or something."

Simpson raised a clerical hand, protesting. His amazing morning swept before his mind like a moving-picture film; there were so many things he could not explain even to himself, much less to these two Gentiles.

"I found lodgings," he said.

"Lodgings?" Witherbee and Bunsen chorused the word. "Where, for heaven's sake?"

"I don't know the name of the street," Simpson admitted. "I don't even know the name of my hostess. That"--indicating the cripple--"is her son."

"Good God!" Witherbee exclaimed. "Madame Picard! The mamaloi!"

"The--the what?" But Simpson had heard well enough.

"The mamaloi--the mamaloi--high priestess of voodoo."

"Her house is fairly clean," Simpson said. He was hardly aware of his own inconsequence. It was his instinct to defend any one who was attacked on moral grounds, whether they deserved the attack or not.

"Ye-es," Witherbee drawled. "I dare say it is. It's her company that's unsavoury. Especially for a parson. Eh? What's the matter now?"

Simpson had flared up at his last words. His mouth set and his eyes burned suddenly. Bunsen, watching him coolly, wondered that he could kindle so; until that moment he had seemed but half alive. When he spoke his words came hurriedly--were almost unintelligible; yet there was some quality in his voice that compelled attention, affecting the senses more than the mind.

"Unsavoury company? That's best for a parson. 'I come not to bring the righteous but sinners to repentance.' And who are you to brand the woman as common or unclean? If she is a heathen priestess, yet she worships a god of some sort. Do you?" He stopped suddenly; the humility which men hated in him again blanketed his fanaticism. "It is my task to give her a better god--the only true God--Christ."

Bunsen, his legs wide apart, kept his eyes on the sea, for he did not want to let Simpson see him smiling, and he was smiling. Witherbee, who had no emotions of any sort, pulled his moustache farther down and looked at the clergyman as though he were under glass--a curiosity.

"So you're going to convert the whole island?" he said.

"I hope to make a beginning in the Lord's vineyard."

"Humph! The devil's game-preserve, you mean," Bunsen suddenly broke in.

"The devil's game-preserve, then!" Simpson was defiant.

"The ship calls here every other Saturday," was all Bunsen said to that. "You may need to know. I'll send your trunk ashore."

He stepped into the cripple's boat and started for the ship. Witherbee did not speak; Simpson, still raging, left him, strode to the end of the pier, and stood there, leaning on a pile.

His gust of emotion had left him; a not unfamiliar feeling of exaltation had taken its place. It is often so with the extreme Puritan type; control relaxed for however brief a moment sends their slow blood whirling, and leaves them light-headed as those who breathe thin air. From boyhood Simpson had been practised in control, until repression had become a prime tenet of his faith. The cheerful and generally innocent excursions of other men assumed in his mind the proportions of crime, of sin against the stern disciplining of the soul which he conceived to be the goal of life. Probably he had never in all his days been so shocked as once when a young pagan had scorned certain views of his, saying; "There's more education--soul education, if you will have it--in five minutes of sheer joy than in a century of sorrow." It was an appalling statement, that--more appalling because he had tried to contradict it and had been unable to do so. He himself had been too eager to find his work in life--his pre-ordained work--ever to discover the deep truths that light-heartedness only can reveal; even when he heard his call to foreign missions--to Hayti, in particular--he felt no such felicity as a man should feel who has climbed to his place in the scheme of things. His was rather the sombre fury of the Covenanters--an intense conviction that his way was the only way of grace--a conviction that transcended reason and took flight into the realm of overmastering emotion--the only overmastering emotion, by the way, that he had ever experienced.

His choice, therefore, was in itself a loss of control and a dangerous one, for nothing is more perilous to sanity than the certainty that most other people in the world are wrong. Such conviction leads to a Jesuitical contempt of means; in cases where the Puritan shell has grown to be impregnable from the outside it sets up an internal ferment which sometimes bursts shell and man and all into disastrous fragments. Until old age kills them, the passions and emotions never die in man; suppress them how we will, we can never ignore them; they rise again to mock us when we think we are done with them forever. And the man of Simpson's type suffers from them most of all, for he dams against them all normal channels of expression.

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