In the Shadow/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
DESSALINES' PRAYER
DURING Dessalines' absence Rosenthal had gone ahead rapidly with his preparations for the campaign. Had he not known the character of Admiral Killik and the demoralized condition of his worthless crew, Rosenthal would have entertained grave doubts concerning the ability of his vessel to cope with the Crête-à-Pierrot. He knew Killik, however, for an adventurer; his negro crew utterly unreliable, and at most times ashore or lying half-drunk about the vessel. Moreover the Jew had confidence in Dessalines so far as his physical courage was concerned, especially when supported by himself. The Waccamaw was well armed with six six-pounders and the two field pieces which were to be mounted on the berth deck and could be trained through the freight ports.
Rosenthal personally was a courageous man; in fact, considering the size of the stake, he felt an actual zest for the throw which was to decide it. With him valor was inspired by profit; glory could not have awakened it; in this he was a direct atavism to the early Phœnician merchant pirate.
The element which caused him the greatest disquiet was the selection of the two officers, captain and mate, required to navigate the Waccamaw. There were several men of his acquaintance whom he might have selected had he not been pressed for time. As it was he had been obliged to refer the matter to Mr. Mallock, the head of a firm which had found the sinews for more than one filibustering enterprise. Mallock, like the Jew, was a man of utter financial honesty. Although continually involved in illegal ventures he had the reputation all through the West Indies, Central and South America, of a man whose word was inviolate. Mallock was respected in Colombia, feared in Santo Domingo, dreaded in Venezuela, and trusted everywhere. He had been candid with Rosenthal.
"I can get you two men to fill these billets," he had said. "One is an old rascal, the other a young rascal; both are sneeringly fearless and both are good seamen and navigators. I think that they will play fair with you, but I will not guarantee them. I have specified in their contracts that they are not to leave the vessel until after you have met the Crête and landed your troops; it will be your lookout to see that they are not tampered with. My advice would be that if one of them goes ashore—breaks his agreement—to go ahead without him and take your chances on handling the thing yourself. You certainly are competent to do that."
Rosenthal had smiled; his heavy mustache had drawn up and outward, baring a diamond-shaped expanse of yellow teeth.
"I shall try to do better than that, Mr. Mallock. If one of these fellows, whom I shall have watched, attempts to go ashore he will do so on his face with a hole through the top of his head." Again the smile.
"That is a good plan, too," Mallock had replied. "You know your business, Brother Rosenthal; the Cuban and Venezuelan affairs have given you a good schooling and if you only knew how to lay a course and get the sun you might do away with this difficulty. It is a pity that it is not a month later; I could provide you with a pair of the most honest cutthroats that ever stole a ship. Men of principle in their profession, like ourselves. You need have no doubt about your engineer, he is far too cantankerous to be approached by anybody; moreover he is engaged in translating the 'Life of John the Baptist' into Norwegian and that will take all of his time. There is nothing so satisfactory in this sort of work as a consistent crank." And so the conversation had ended.
Rosenthal had dealt honestly with Dessalines. He knew that his employer's resources would be severely taxed before the close of his campaign and in his own mind he was not so sure that further assistance would be forthcoming. He, Rosenthal, had more to gain through the success of the campaign than he could have effected by the most flagrant dishonesty, even had he been dishonest, which he was not. He was anxious for Dessalines to succeed; after that if he, Rosenthal, did not succeed he felt that he would be a very stupid fellow.
•••••••
Dessalines arrived in New York at noon and was met at the depot by his agent.
"Mon cher Comte!" cried the Jew, talking rapidly and in French, "of course you have not heard the news?"
"No," replied Dessalines quickly, "tell me!"
"One moment; it is necessary to be discreet. When we are in the cab, my dear fellow!" With the aid of Jules and the porter, Dessalines' luggage was secured and placed on the coach. Jules sat with the driver.
"Quick, my friend!" exclaimed Dessalines as they started. "I die of curiosity."
"Then let me tell you that the Crête-à-Pierrot is destroyed and Admiral Killik killed."
"It cannot be true!" cried Dessalines.
"There can be no doubt of the accuracy of my information. The facts are these: This absurd Killik, after declaring himself a pirate, soon finds himself in need of supplies. Now it happens that the Provisional Government had shipped by the German steamship Markomannia, arms and ammunition for Nord Alexis at Cape Haitien. This fool Killik, who although denying any authority, had been supporting Firmin, sees fit to declare these munitions contraband of war, and accordingly about the end of last month he meets the German steamer at sea near Cape Haitien and with profuse threats to captain and crew takes possession of the arms and ammunition."
"Mon Dieu!" gasped Dessalines.
Rosenthal continued. "On September 6th the German cruiser Panther entered the harbor of Port au Prince, whence she proceeded .with sealed orders to St. Marc in search of the Crête-à-Pierrot. Thence she went to Gonaïves, where she found her lying in harbor, practically deserted by officers and crew, who were all ashore together indulging in a debauch. The Panther signalled for the Crête to surrender and orders were given to open fire upon the Haytian vessel at the first attempt of anyone on board her to serve a gun. It seems that while the Panther was signalling and was on the point of sending a prize crew to take possession, a small explosion occurred upon the after deck of the Crête. This is supposed to have been an attempt on the part of one of the drunken crew to blow up the vessel with all on board."
"Seigneur!" rumbled Dessalines' deep voice.
"It appears that Admiral Killik, his surgeon, and two or three of the crew, all suffering from the effects of their debauch, had returned. The admiral, it is to laugh, my dear Comte, was suffering from a wound in the hand where he had been bitten by one of his sailors! One says that both the surgeon and the admiral had attempted to blow up the vessel; but whatever the cause, the effect was to draw the fire of the Panther, and after she had delivered a dozen or more shots from her rapid-firing guns the Crête began to sink, not having fired a shot. With her sank the admiral, the doctor, and two of the sailors, all too drunk to swim for their lives!"
Rosenthal concluded, and as he did so, leaned toward Dessalines as if to embrace him, but the negro drew slightly back. The congratulation of his agent seemed at the moment out of place, insufficient, flippant. Dessalines was overcome by the news; he was startled, numbed; his faculties lacked the rapidity to absorb it; he contemplated slowly the fact that the last serious impediment had been miraculously swept from his path. With the death of the mad white admiral, his success seemed assured; all things were working toward his ends.
His thick voice was caught in a sob. "It is necessary to be grateful to a Divine Providence," he said in a choking voice. His throat seemed to swell, the tears gushed from his eyes, his voice was inarticulate. Rosenthai, accustomed as he was to the Gallicized African, watched him curiously and in silence.
He knew Dessalines to be deeply religious; this was the most profound quality in the negro's character, and was less the result of precept than a natural reaching out for the sublime. The Haytian was not strongly Christian; the meek Saviour failed to inspire him, but the vision of an omnipotent, omnipresent, brow-brooding Jehovah was the acme of his imaginative heights. He prayed seldom but then volubly, groveling, flat on his face, his great frame rent with convulsive heavings. When he did wrong, he dreamed of hell.
Dessalines' sense of right and wrong was instinctive, but extreme. Since his conversion to his new, stern, uncondoning Protestant faith, he had not been guilty of a single lapse. Lust, perhaps, stood at the head of his sinful category and represented hell in its direst form; he shivered while he panted. There had been times when he would have flogged his naked body with brambles had such a course been suggested to him, these flagellations being less punitive than chastening.
His earnest wish was for Truth; his infrequent, frenzied prayers for Purity. One may say that this is not characteristic, not typical. If one studies the negro he will find it to be true.
Rosenthal eyed him with the uncomfortable sense of lacking comprehension which sometimes comes over one when a nature excessively transparent reveals unlocked for depths.
"This saves us money," he observed presently. "That is if Mallock will take back some of the guns."
Dessalines roused himself as a dog shakes after a plunge.
"It is better to retain them." The negro had no conception of economy; he had no idea of when to cease spending. His imagination was unable to grapple with want in the abstract.
"But we should economize, my friend," protested Rosenthal. "Myself, I have haggled over every dollar spent. If there is no Crête why spend money unnecessarily for guns?"
"We will find it easier to get back the money paid for the guns with them, than without them," said Dessalines sententiously.
This flash of statecraft impressed the Jew. It was accidental; nevertheless it was there and Rosenthal assented almost with respect.
Dessalines was silent for several minutes. Rosenthal heard him muttering to himself; he was aware of this mannerism of a negro when deeply stirred; alone, Dessalines would have talked aloud.
"It is a sign!" he burst out so suddenly that Rosenthal started. The Jew had been deep in his own imaginings which were purely practical. "It is a sign, my friend; an omen! God intends that I shall win! I have felt it in my heart. It has been permitted me to see visions … like Jeanne d'Arc." Dessalines' voice arose, the protruding eyes rolled, he was possessed. "With the loss of the Crête, Firmin's chances are over, yet this blow has been sufficiently, delayed to block the descent of Nord Alexis from the North. Pierre and Fouchard are at a deadlock. Jean Jumeau, who still holds Gonaïves, will prevent Nord Alexis from reaching Port au Prince. Ah, if we were but there! The opportunity hangs like a mango ripe for the plucking."
Dessalines' emotion had passed; now he trembled with eagerness, with suppressed action. Rosenthal felt the great shoulder muscles tighten and relax against his own; the deep voice rumbled in a bass key which undertoned the traffic of the streets.
"Push your work of preparation to the utmost, my dear Rosenthal!" exclaimed Dessalines suddenly. "I die of impatience. Advance the hour of our sailing. Believe me," his voice grew sonorous, contained a regal ring, "you will not find Dessalines ungrateful!"
Rosenthal turned away his head to hide a smile. "We will do our best, majesté," he replied.
Dessalines, delighted, laughed aloud; clapped his agent on the shoulder, embraced him, called him a dear fellow.
•••••••
A week later found the Waccamaw in the Gulf Stream. The day had been one of tension, disquiet. The oppressive air, the mission, had tautened nerves; there had been friction between Rosenthal and the two officers; its cause, a lacking respect in the attitude of the two men toward Dessalines. The hardened old captain and the vicious youthful mate had seen a side of the Semitic character which their joint voyagings had never shown them. A smiling assurance of physical damage from a Jew who stood ferociously ready to put his threat into execution had perhaps awed them more than the threat itself. Rosenthal had won his point, threatened violence, then invited them to drink. He was a competent man.
At midnight Dessalines awoke; his slumbers had been nervous and fitful. The African is not a deep sleeper; he is indolent; rests at odd intervals, like a dog, a cat, any primitive creature. In the deep night he will awake, listen, twitch, peer, often arise and prowl when a white man will be fathoms deep in oblivion.
Dessalines lay upon his bunk and listened to the throb of the machinery. The Waccamaw was a good ship; she ran smoothly "in a groove," true as a liner. The brokers had played fair; Rosenthal had played fair; Dessalines had bought a good vessel cheaply. Her machinery held no false notes; no rough sounds.
Dessalines listened to the throb and beat and found himself adapting the time to an English evangelical hymn which had always stirred him. He began to voice the words to the thrust from the great cylinders, the click of the eccentric, the jar of the circulating pump:
"Mine eyes shall see the glory of the coming of the Lord!"
It was the only verse which he remembered, but this made no difference. With negro infatuation for monotony, he repeated it over and over with no sense of sameness. "Mine eyes shall see the glory of the coming of the Lord!"—"Mine eyes shall see the glory of the coming of the Lord!"—"Mine eyes shall see the glory of the coming of the Lord!"
The result was predestined. The Negro, the Arab, the Kanaka, all primitive races can develop a hypnotic or, better, fanatic frenzy by means of the erosion produced by the same repeated impulse on a single group of cells of the nerves of sight or hearing; a drum, a chant, revolving lights, the result is the same. Dessalines, first thinking, then humming, then murmuring these words to the rhythmic swing of the machinery, soon found himself upon the point of shouting: "Mine eyes shall see the glory of the coming of the Lord!" and soon he found that he was chanting the words full-toned, while the stirring of Jules and Rosenthal in their bunks told him that they had been awakened.
Sleep was impossible. He leaped from his bunk and made his way on deck in his pajamas. The night was dark as a night in the Gulf Stream can be.
The day had been sultry, humid; the air aqueous with the soddenness of that broad, tropical river flowing its even course through the ocean as if confined in banks of clay. Dessalines passed beneath the bridge, on up into the eyes, where he found a negro lookout stationed. This man he utterly disregarded. He was an American, a peasant, doubtless filled with superstitious awe at the weird shapes floating in the murk and the soft voices talking in the wind.
It was blowing a fresh gale ahead and gaining in weight as the night wore on. The ship was snoring into the short, head sea; the white fire flaming from her bows and whirling astern in blazing eddies. Dessalines, as far forward as he could go, leaned in the angle of the bow, straining forward, staring at the shrouded horizon. There was the reek of brine in the wet wind and a weight as of solid water which failed to satisfy his deep-lunged craving for air. The drench of the spray upon his naked chest was warm as the wind and no more humid.
For long he stood there, his head whirling with each soaring plunge; his brain reeling with wild fancies; one displacing the other, even as the racing swells swept past the flying bows. He could not think; his mind failed to detain one single hurrying fancy; his whole great being was plastic as the sea driven by the rush of the gale.
Then as the night deepened the sea began to swarm with life. Dessalines leaned lower and watched the fiery trails of the sea folk as they tore apart the solid water beneath the flaming crests of the billows. Schools of porpoises swept past, lashing the sea into a maelstrom of lambent fire; far in the depths mammoth hydrozoa glowed pale and diaphanous with each expansion of their pendulous disks. Strange monsters plunged beneath the keel, leaving the trails of comets; and the wash of the sea across the sloping decks poured from the scuppers in a spray of bluish flame.
And then the heavens began to answer the conflagrations of the deep. Back rolled the soggy rain clouds, to leave the sky as clear and deep as a sapphire with the stars aquiver as seen through the rushing wind. It was the month of meteors, and as the Haytian's eyes, giddied by the swirl of water, turned aloft, a bolide drifted across the course and exploded with the brilliance of a costern light. Down came the meteors in showers, now here, now there, crossing and recrossing and seaming the clear sky with trails of fire.
The negro at his elbow was muttering to himself. Dessalines did not hear him; into his brain there rushed the grand, inspiring words of the nineteenth psalm. He raised his face, the features working, writhing, his soul filled with an agony of exaltation; an exaltation born of the pale fires in the sea and the blazing night as it roared across the Gulf Stream. He threw out both great arms, wrists bent, palms turned upward; the tremendous voice burst with a roar from the heaving chest:
"‘The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handiwork!’"
"Great God! Great Jehovah, look Thou this night upon thy laboring creature. Even as this ship strives on through the black darkness of the night, reaching for the goal she cannot see, even so do I, omnipotent Lord, strive on blindly groping, my course directed by the compass of Thy word. Grant me strength, O Jehovah! Grant me wisdom; grant me patience in adversity, and beyond all, O Thou whose myriad subject universes blaze now before my awe-struck eyes, grant me a pure soul, a clean heart, to lead my people out of the shadow!"
He fell upon his knees. His great forearms resting on the rail pillowed the massive head; the recumbent body was torn with convulsive sobs.
For an hour he prayed, an uncouth, huddled mass; prayed aloud, while the awe-struck negro behind him listened shivering. Fragments of frenzied eloquence, carried on the flaws of wind to the bridge, sent quivers down the spine of the hardened adventurer in command of the vessel. The night passed its perehelion; the first rosy lights of the swift tropic dawn began to glow; the phosphorescence paled, then departed sullenly.
Dessalines' prayer was over, had given way to a deep and peaceful meditation; slowly his transfigured soul descended from its exalted heights. The wheel and lookout had been relieved. A new negro was at the elbow of the Haytian; the vicious, boyish mate had relieved the captain.
"La-and Oh-o!" sang the lookout suddenly. Dessalines started, raised his head, stared out across the lightening sea.
"Where away?" bawled the sleepy boy upon the bridge.
"Dade ahaid, sah! High Ian', sah!" sang the negro.
Dessalines strained his eyes, but though good they were not sea-eyes. The mate was staring through his glasses. Previously he had been watching Dessalines curiously.
"It's the Mole, all right," he answered with a grin. "If you come up here, general, you can make it out through the glass." The two officers had in a semi-mockery irritating to both Dessalines and Rosenthal conferred this title upon their negro employer.
Dessalines ascended the ladder. From the bridge, as the day swiftly lightened, he did not need the glass. Far on the horizon the rough, mountainous outline of the savage island raised blue and hazy from the ultramarine sea.
For the moment Dessalines could scarcely speak; his emotion overcame him. The youthful mate, glancing at him curiously, could see the vibration of the huge, black, naked chest.
"It is the Mole St. Nicholas!" exclaimed Dessalines. "Hayti!" His eyes rolled, the flat nostrils dilated; the thick lips rolled back and the white teeth flashed; an expression of such savage ferocity, exultation, contorted the grotesque features that the watch officer, hardened as he was, drew back, startled, appalled.
"Hayti!" roared Dessalines. He threw out an arm with a gesture of greeting. "Bon jour, belle Haiti!" He smote his chest a blow with his clinched fist. "Haiti!—Haiti!—ta renaissance est arrivée!"