Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860

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"'When I see her,' he asked, 'am I at liberty to say what I choose?'

"On that I could have said, 'No.' Redmond and I have not seen each
other since the period of my first visit to you. He has been nursing
his wife in the mean time, taking journeys with her, and trying all
sorts of cures; and now he seems tied to his aunt and mother-in-law. He
was merely passing through the city with her, and this morning they
have gone again.--Well," after a pause, "there is no need of words
between us. I have in my possession a part of you. Beautiful women are
like flowers which open their leaves wide enough for their perfume to
attract wandering bees; the perfume is wasted, though the honey may be
hid."

"Alas, what a lesson this man is giving me!" I thought.

"Farewell, then," he said. He bit his lips, and his clenched hands
trembled; but he mastered his emotion. "You must think of me."

"And see you, too," I answered. "Everything comes round again, if we
live long enough. Dramatic unities are never preserved in life; if they
were, how poetical would all these things be! But Time whirls us round,
showing us our many-sided feelings as carelessly as a child rattles the
bits of glass in his kaleidoscope."

"So be it!" he replied. "Adieu!"

That afternoon I staid at home, and put John's room in order, and
cleaned the dust from his Indian idols, and was extremely busy till he
came in. Then I kissed his whiskers, and told him all my sins, and
cried once or twice during my confession. He petted me a good deal, and
made me eat twice as much dinner as I wanted; he said it was good for
me, and I obeyed him, for I felt uncommonly meek that day.

Soon after, Redmond sent me a long letter. He said he had been, from a
boy, under an obligation to his aunt, the mother of his wife. It was a
common story, and he would not trouble me with it. He was married soon
after Harry Lothrop's first visit to me, at the time they had received
the news of Laura's death. How much he had thought of Laura afterward,
while he was watching the fading away of his pale blossom! His aunt had
been ill since the death of her daughter, restless, and discontented
with every change. He hoped she was now settled among some old friends
with whom she might find consolation. In conclusion, he wrote,--"My
aunt noticed our hasty exit from the opera-house that night, when I was
brute enough to nearly kill you. I told her that I loved you. She now
feels, after a struggle, that she must let me go. 'Old women have no
rights,' she said to me yesterday. Margaret, may I come, and never leave
you again?"

My answer may be guessed, for one day he arrived. It was the dusk of a
cheery winter day, the time when home wears so bright a look to those
who seek it. It was an hour before dinner, and I was waiting for John
to come in. The amber evening sky gleamed before the windows, and the
fire made a red core of light in the room. John's sandal-wood boxes
gave out strange odors in the heat, and the pattern of the Persian rug
was just visible. A servant came to the door with a card. I held it to
the grate, and the fire lit up his name.

"Show him up-stairs," I said.

I stood in the doorway, and heard his step on every stair. When he
came, I took him by the hand, and drew him into the room. He was
speechless.

"Oh, Redmond, I love you! How long you were away!"

He kneeled by me, and put my arms round his neck, and we kissed each
other with the first, best kiss of passion.

John came in, and I reached out my hand to him and said, "This is my
husband."

"That's comfortable," he answered. "Won't you stay to dinner?"

"Oh, yes," replied Redmond; "this is my hotel."

"I see," said John.

But after dinner they had a long talk together. John sent me to my
room, and I was glad to go. I walked up and down, crying, I must say,
most of the time, asking forgiveness of myself for my faults, and
remembering Laura and Maurice,--and then thinking Redmond was mine,
with a contraction of the heart which threatened to stifle me.

John took us up to Leonora's that evening; he said he wanted to see if
Puss would be tantalized with the sight of such a beautiful romantic
couple just from fairy-land, who were now prepared "to live in peace."

We were married the next day in a church in a by-street. John was the
only witness, and flourished a large silk handkerchief, so that it had
the effect of a triumphal banner. Redmond put the ring on the wrong
finger,--a mistake which the minister kindly rectified. All I had new
for the occasion was a pair of gloves.

One morning after my marriage, when Redmond and John were smoking
together, I was turning over some boxes, for I was packing to go home
on a visit to our mother. I called Redmond to leave his pipe and come
to me.

"You have not seen any of my property. Look, here it is:--

"One bitten handkerchief.

"A fan never used.

"A gold pen-holder.

"A draggled shawl."

"Margaret," he said, taking my chin in his hand and bringing his eyes
close to mine, "I am wild with happiness."

"Your pipe has gone out," we heard John say.

* * * * *

THE PLAYMATE.

The pines were dark on Ramoth hill,
Their song was soft and low;
The blossoms in the sweet May wind
Were falling like the snow.

The blossoms drifted at our feet,
The orchard birds sang clear;
The sweetest and the saddest day
It seemed of all the year.

For, more to me than birds or flowers,
My playmate left her home,
And took with her the laughing spring,
The music and the bloom.

She kissed the lips of kith and kin,
She laid her hand in mine:
What more could ask the bashful boy
Who fed her father's kine?

She left us in the bloom of May:
The constant years told o'er
Their seasons with as sweet May morns.
But she came back no more.

I walk, with noiseless feet, the round
Of uneventful years;
Still o'er and o'er I sow the spring
And reap the autumn ears.

She lives where all the golden year
Her summer roses blow;
The dusky children of the sun
Before her come and go.

There haply with her jewelled hands
She smooths her silken gown,--
No more the homespun lap wherein
I shook the walnuts down.

The wild grapes wait us by the brook,
The brown nuts on the hill,
And still the May-day flowers make sweet
The woods of Follymill.

The lilies blossom in the pond,
The bird builds in the tree,
The dark pines sing on Ramoth hill
The slow song of the sea.

I wonder if she thinks of them,
And how the old time seems,--
If ever the pines of Ramoth wood
Are sounding in her dreams.

I see her face, I hear her voice:
Does she remember mine?
And what to her is now the boy
Who fed her father's kine?

What cares she that the orioles build
For other eyes than ours,--
That other hands with nuts are filled,
And other laps with flowers?

O playmate in the golden time!
Our mossy seat is green,
Its fringing violets blossom yet,
The old trees o'er it lean.

The winds so sweet with birch and fern
A sweeter memory blow;
And there in spring the veeries sing
The song of long ago.

And still the pines of Ramoth wood
Are moaning like the sea,--
The moaning of the sea of change
Between myself and thee!

THE MAROONS OF SURINAM.

When that eccentric individual, Captain John Gabriel Stedman, resigned
his commission in the English navy, took the oath of abjuration, and
was appointed ensign in the Scots brigade employed for two centuries by
Holland, he little knew that "their High Mightinesses the States of the
United Provinces" would send him out, within a year, to the forests of
Guiana, to subdue rebel negroes. He never imagined that the year 1773
would behold him beneath the rainy season in a tropical country, wading
through marshes and splashing through lakes, exploring with his feet
for submerged paths, commanding impracticable troops and commanded by
an insufferable colonel, feeding on gree-gree worms and fed upon by
mosquitoes, howled at by jaguars, hissed at by serpents, and shot at by
those exceedingly unattainable gentlemen, "still longed for, never seen,"
the Maroons of Surinam.

Yet, as our young ensign sailed up the Surinam river, the world of
tropic beauty came upon him with enchantment. Dark, moist verdure was
close around him, rippling waters below; the tall trees of the jungle
and the low mangroves beneath were all hung with long vines and lianas,
a maze of cordage, like a fleet at anchor; odd monkeys travelled
ceaselessly up and down these airy paths, in armies, bearing their
young, like knapsacks, on their backs; macaws and humming-birds, winged
jewels, flew from tree to tree. As they neared Paramaribo, the river
became a smooth canal among luxuriant plantations, the air was perfumed
music, redolent of orange-blossoms and echoing with the songs of birds
and the sweet plash of oars; gay barges came forth to meet them; "while
groups of naked boys and girls were promiscuously playing and
flouncing, like so many tritons and mermaids, in the water." And when
the troops disembarked,--five hundred fine young men, the oldest not
thirty, all arrayed in new uniforms and bearing orange-flowers in their
caps, a bridal wreath for beautiful Guiana,--it is no wonder that the
Creole ladies were in ecstasy, and the boyish recruits little foresaw
the day, when, reduced to a few dozens, barefooted and ragged as
filibusters, their last survivors would gladly reembark from a country
beside which even Holland looked dry and even Scotland comfortable.

For over all that earthly paradise there brooded not alone its terrible
malaria, its days of fever and its nights of deadly chill, but the
worse shadows of oppression and of sin, which neither day nor night
could banish. The first object which met Stedman's eye, as he stepped
on shore, was the figure of a young girl stripped to receive two
hundred lashes, and chained to a hundred-pound-weight. And the few
first days gave a glimpse into a state of society worthy of this
exhibition,--men without mercy, women without modesty, the black man a
slave to the white man's passions, and the white man a slave to his
own. The present West Indian society in its worst forms is probably a
mere dilution of the utter profligacy of those days. Greek or Roman
decline produced nothing more debilitating or destructive than the
ordinary life of a Surinam planter, and his one virtue of hospitality
only led to more unbridled excesses and completed the work of vice. No
wonder that Stedman himself, who, with all his peculiarities, was
essentially simple and manly, soon became disgusted, and made haste to
get into the woods and cultivate the society of the Maroons.

The rebels against whom this expedition was sent were not the original
Maroons of Surinam, but a later generation. The originals had long
since established their independence, and their leaders were
flourishing their honorary silver-mounted canes in the streets of
Paramaribo. Fugitive negroes had begun to establish themselves in the
woods from the time when the colony was finally ceded by the English to
the Dutch, in 1674. The first open outbreak occurred in 1726, when the
plantations on the Seramica river revolted; it was found impossible to
subdue them, and the government very imprudently resolved to make an
example of eleven captives, and thus terrify the rest of the rebels.
They were tortured to death, eight of the eleven being women; this
drove the others to madness, and plantation after plantation was
visited with fire and sword. After a long conflict, their chief, Adoe,
was induced to make a treaty, in 1749. The rebels promised to keep the
peace, and in turn were promised freedom, money, tools, clothes, and,
finally, arms and ammunition.

But no permanent peace was ever made upon a barrel of gunpowder as a
basis, and of course an explosion followed this one. The colonists
naturally evaded the last item of the bargain, and the rebels,
receiving the gifts and remarking the omission of the part of Hamlet,
asked contemptuously if the Europeans expected negroes to subsist on
combs and looking-glasses? New hostilities at once began; a new body of
slaves on the Ouca river revolted; the colonial government was changed
in consequence, and fresh troops shipped from Holland; and after four
different embassies had been sent into the woods, the rebels began to
listen to reason. The black generals, Captain Araby and Captain Boston,
agreed upon a truce for a year, during which the colonial government
might decide for peace or war, the Maroons declaring themselves
indifferent. Finally the government chose peace, delivered ammunition,
and made a treaty, in 1761; the white and black plenipotentiaries
exchanged English oaths and then negro oaths, each tasting a drop of
the other's blood during the latter ceremony, amid a volley of
remarkable incantations from the black _gadoman_ or priest. After some
final skirmishes, in which the rebels almost always triumphed, the
treaty was at length accepted by all the various villages of Maroons.
Had they known that at this very time five thousand slaves in Berbice
were just rising against their masters and were looking to them for
assistance, the result might have been different; but this fact had not
reached them, nor had the rumors of insurrection in Brazil, among negro
and Indian slaves. They consented, therefore, to the peace. "They write
from Surinam," says the "Annual Register" for January 23, 1761, "that
the Dutch governor, finding himself unable to subdue the rebel negroes
of that country by force, hath wisely followed the example of Governor
Trelawney at Jamaica, and concluded an amicable treaty with them; in
consequence of which, all the negroes of the woods are acknowledged to
be free, and all that is past is buried in oblivion." So ended a war of
thirty-six years, and in Stedman's day the original three thousand Ouca
and Seramica Maroons had multiplied (almost incredibly) to fifteen
thousand.

But for the slaves not sharing in this revolt it was not so
easy to "bury the whole past in oblivion." The Maroons had told
some very plain truths to the white ambassadors, and had frankly
advised them, if they wished for peace, to mend their own
manners and treat their slaves humanely. But the planters learned
nothing by experience,--and indeed, the terrible narrations of Stedman
were confirmed by those of Alexander, so lately as 1831. Of course,
therefore, in a colony comprising eighty thousand blacks to four
thousand whites, other revolts were stimulated by the success of this
one. They reached their highest point in 1772, when an insurrection on
the Cottica river, led by a negro named Baron, almost gave the
finishing blow to the colony; the only adequate protection being found
in a body of slaves liberated expressly for that purpose,--a dangerous
and humiliating precedent. "We have been obliged to set three or four
hundred of our stoutest negroes free to defend us," says an honest
letter from Surinam in the "Annual Register" for September 5, 1772.
Fortunately for the safety of the planters, Baron presumed too much
upon his numbers, and injudiciously built a camp too near the
sea-coast, in a marshy fastness, from which he was finally ejected by
twelve hundred Dutch troops, though the chief work was done, Stedman
thinks, by the "black rangers" or liberated slaves. Checked by this
defeat, he again drew back into the forests, resuming his guerrilla
warfare against the plantations. Nothing could dislodge him;
bloodhounds were proposed, but the moisture of the country made them
useless; and thus matters stood when Stedman came sailing, amid
orange-blossoms and music, up the winding Surinam.

Our young officer went into the woods in the condition of Falstaff,
"heinously unprovided." Coming from the unbounded luxury of the
plantations, he found himself entering "the most horrid and
impenetrable forests, where no kind of refreshment was to be had,"--he
being provisioned only with salt pork and peas. After a wail of sorrow
for this inhuman neglect, he bursts into a gush of gratitude for the
private generosity which relieved his wants at the last moment by the
following list of supplies:--"24 bottles best claret, 12 ditto Madeira,
12 ditto porter, 12 ditto cider, 12 ditto rum, 2 large loaves white
sugar, 2 gallons brandy, 6 bottles muscadel, 2 gallons lemon-juice, 2
gallons ground coffee, 2 large Westphalia hams, 2 salted bullocks'
tongues, 1 bottle Durham mustard, 6 dozen spermaceti candles." The hams
and tongues seem, indeed, rather a poor halfpennyworth to this
intolerable deal of sack; but this instance of Surinam privation in
those days may open some glimpse at the colonial standards of comfort.
"From this specimen," moralizes our hero, "the reader will easily
perceive, that, if some of the inhabitants of Surinam show themselves
the disgrace of the creation by their cruelties and brutality, others,
by their social feelings, approve themselves an ornament to the human
species. With this instance of virtue and generosity I therefore
conclude this chapter."

But the troops soon had to undergo worse troubles than those of the
_commisariat_. The rainy season had just set in. "As for the negroes,"
said Mr. Klynhaus, the last planter with whom they parted, "you may
depend on never seeing a soul of them, unless they attack you off
guard; but the climate, the climate, will murder you all." Bringing
with them constitutions already impaired by the fevers and dissipation
of Paramaribo, the poor boys began to perish long before they began to
fight. Wading in water all day, hanging their hammocks over water at
night, it seemed a moist existence, even compared with the climate of
England and the soil of Holland. It was "Invent a shovel and be a
magistrate," even more than Andrew Marvell found it in the United
Provinces. In fact, Raynal evidently thinks that nothing but Dutch
experience in hydraulics could ever have cultivated Surinam.

The two gun-boats which held one division of the expedition were merely
old sugar-barges, roofed over with boards, and looking like coffins.
They were pleasantly named the "Charon" and the "Cerberus," but Stedman
thought that the "Sudden Death" and the "Wilful Murder" would have been
titles more appropriate. The chief duty of the troops consisted in
lying at anchor at the intersections of wooded streams, waiting for
rebels who never came. It was dismal work, and the raw recruits were
full of the same imaginary terrors which have haunted other heroes less
severely tested: the monkeys never rattled the cocoa-nuts against the
trees, but they all heard the axes of Maroon wood-choppers; and when a
sentinel declared, one night, that he had seen a negro go down the
river in a canoe, with his pipe lighted, the whole force was called to
arms--against a firefly. In fact, the insect race brought by far the
most substantial dangers. The rebels eluded the military, but the
chigres, locusts, scorpions, and bush-spiders were ever ready to come
half-way to meet them; likewise serpents and alligators proffered them
the freedom of the forests and exhibited a hospitality almost
excessive. Snakes twenty feet long hung their seductive length from the
trees; jaguars volunteered their society through almost impenetrable
marshes; vampire bats perched by night with lulling endearments upon
their toes. When Stedman describes himself as killing thirty-eight
mosquitoes at one stroke, we must perhaps pardon something to the
spirit of martyrdom. But when we add to these the other woes of his
catalogue,--prickly-heat, ring-worm, putrid-fever, "the growling of
Colonel Fougeaud, dry, sandy savannas, unfordable marshes, burning hot
days, cold and damp nights, heavy rains, and short allowance,"--we can
hardly wonder that three captains died in a month, and that in two
months his detachment of forty-two was reduced to a miserable seven.

Yet, through all this, Stedman himself kept his health. His theory of
the matter almost recalls the time-honored prescription of "A light
heart and a thin pair of breeches," for he attributes his good
condition to his keeping up his spirits and kicking off his shoes.
Daily bathing in the river had also something to do with it,--and,
indeed, hydropathy (this may not be generally known) was first learned
of the West India Maroons, who did their "packing" in wet clay,--and it
was carried by Dr. Wright to England. But his extraordinary personal
qualities must have contributed most to his preservation. Never did a
"meagre, starved, black, burnt, and ragged tatterdemalion," as he calls
himself, carry about him such a fund of sentiment, philosophy, poetry,
and art. He had a great faculty for sketching, as the engravings in his
volumes, with all their odd peculiarities, show; his deepest woes he
coined always into couplets, and fortified himself against hopeless
despair with Ovid and Valerius Flaccus, Pope's "Homer" and Thomson's
"Seasons." Above all reigned his passion for natural history, a ready
balm for every ill. Here he was never wanting to the occasion, and, to
do justice to Dutch Guiana, the occasion never was wanting to him. Were
his men sickening, the peccaries were always healthy without, and the
cockroaches within the camp; just escaping from a she-jaguar, he
satisfies himself, ere he flees, that the print of her claws on the
sand is precisely the size of a pewter dinner-plate; bitten by a
scorpion, he makes sure of his scientific description in case he should
expire of the bite; is the water undrinkable, there is at least some
rational interest in the number of legs possessed by the centipedes
which preoccupy it. This is the highest triumph of man over his
accidents, when he thus turns his pains to gains, and becomes an
entomologist in the tropics.

Meanwhile the rebels kept their own course in the forests, and
occasionally descended upon plantations beside the very river on whose
upper waters the useless troops were sickening and dying. Stedman
himself made several campaigns, with long intervals of illness, before
he came any nearer to the enemy than to burn a deserted village or
destroy a rice-field. Sometimes they left the Charon and the Cerberus
moored by grape-vines to the pine-trees, and made expeditions into the
woods single file. Our ensign, true to himself, gives the minutest
schedule of the order of march, and the oddest little diagram of
manikins with cocked hats, and blacker manikins bearing burdens. First,
negroes with bill-hooks to clear the way; then the van-guard; then the
main body, interspersed with negroes bearing boxes of ball-cartridges;
then the rear-guard, with many more negroes, bearing camp-equipage,
provisions, and new rum, surnamed "kill-devil," and appropriately
followed by a sort of palanquin for the disabled. Thus arrayed, they
marched valorously forth into the woods, to some given point; then they
turned, marched back to the boats, then rowed back to camp, and
straightaway went into the hospital. Immediately upon this, the coast
being clear. Baron and his rebels marched out again and proceeded to
business.

In the course of years, these Maroons had acquired their own peculiar
tactics. They built stockaded fortresses on marshy islands, accessible
by fords which they alone could traverse. These they defended further
by sharp wooden pins, or crows'-feet, concealed beneath the surface of
the miry ground,--and, latterly, by the more substantial protection of
cannon, which they dragged into the woods, and learned to use. Their
bush-fighting was unique. Having always more men than weapons, they
arranged their warriors in threes,--one to use the musket, another to
take his place, if wounded or slain, and a third to drag away the body.
They had Indian stealthiness and swiftness, with more than Indian
discipline; discharged their fire with some approach to regularity, in
three successive lines, the signals being given by the captain's horn.
They were full of ingenuity: marked their movements for each other by
scattered leaves and blazed trees; ran zigzag, to dodge bullets; gave
wooden guns to their unarmed men, to frighten the plantation negroes on
their guerrilla expeditions; and borrowed the red caps of the black
rangers whom they slew, to bewilder the aim of the others. One of
them, finding himself close to the muzzle of a ranger's gun, threw up
his hand hastily. "What!" he exclaimed, "will you fire on one of your
own party?" "God forbid!" cried the ranger, dropping his piece, and was
instantly shot through the body by the Maroon, who the next instant had
disappeared in the woods.

These rebels were no saints: their worship was obi-worship; the women
had not far outgrown the plantation standard of chastity, and the men
drank "kill-devil" like their betters. Stedman was struck with the
difference between the meaning of the word "good" in rebellious circles
and in reputable. "It must, however, be observed that what we Europeans
call a good character was by the Africans looked upon as detestable,
especially by those born in the woods, whose only crime consisted in
avenging the wrongs done to their forefathers." But if martial virtues
be virtues, such were theirs. Not a rebel ever turned traitor or
informer, ever flinched in battle or under torture, ever violated a
treaty or even a private promise. But it was their power of endurance
which was especially astounding; Stedman is never weary of paying
tribute to this, or of illustrating it in sickening detail; indeed, the
records of the world show nothing to surpass it; "the lifted axe, the
agonizing wheel" proved powerless to subdue it; with every limb lopped,
every bone broken, the victims yet defied their tormentors, laughed,
sang, and died triumphant.

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