Kate Chopin- The Dover Reader

by Kate Chopin

  When the baby was about three months old, Désirée awoke one day to the conviction that there was something in the air menacing her peace. It was at first too subtle to grasp. It had only been a disquieting suggestion; an air of mystery among the blacks; unexpected visits from far-off neighbors who could hardly account for their coming. Then a strange, an awful change in her husband’s manner, which she dared not ask him to explain. When he spoke to her, it was with averted eyes, from which the old love-light seemed to have gone out. He absented himself from home; and when there, avoided her presence and that of her child, without excuse. And the very spirit of Satan seemed suddenly to take hold of him in his dealings with the slaves. Désirée was miserable enough to die.

  She sat in her room, one hot afternoon, in her peignoir, listlessly drawing through her fingers the strands of her long, silky brown hair that hung about her shoulders. The baby, half naked, lay asleep upon her own great mahogany bed, that was like a sumptuous throne, with its satin-lined half-canopy. One of La Blanche’s little quadroon boys—half naked too—stood fanning the child slowly with a fan of peacock feathers. Désirée’s eyes had been fixed absently and sadly upon the baby, while she was striving to penetrate the threatening mist that she felt closing about her. She looked from her child to the boy who stood beside him, and back again; over and over. “Ah!” It was a cry that she could not help; which she was not conscious of having uttered. The blood turned like ice in her veins, and a clammy moisture gathered upon her face.

  She tried to speak to the little quadroon boy; but no sound would come, at first. When he heard his name uttered, he looked up, and his mistress was pointing to the door. He laid aside the great, soft fan, and obediently stole away, over the polished floor, on his bare tiptoes.

  She stayed motionless, with gaze riveted upon her child, and her face the picture of fright.

  Presently her husband entered the room, and without noticing her, went to a table and began to search among some papers which covered it.

  “Armand,” she called to him, in a voice which must have stabbed him, if he was human. But he did not notice. “Armand,” she said again. Then she rose and tottered towards him. “Armand,” she panted once more, clutching his arm, “look at our child. What does it mean? tell me.”

  He coldly but gently loosened her fingers from about his arm and thrust the hand away from him. “Tell me what it means!” she cried despairingly.

  “It means,” he answered lightly, “that the child is not white; it means that you are not white.”

  A quick conception of all that this accusation meant for her nerved her with unwonted courage to deny it. “It is a lie; it is not true, I am white! Look at my hair, it is brown; and my eyes are gray, Armand, you know they are gray. And my skin is fair,” seizing his wrist. “Look at my hand; whiter than yours, Armand,” she laughed hysterically.

  “As white as La Blanche’s,” he returned cruelly; and went away leaving her alone with their child.

  When she could hold a pen in her hand, she sent a despairing letter to Madame Valmondé.

  “My mother, they tell me I am not white. Armand has told me I am not white. For God’s sake tell them it is not true. You must know it is not true. I shall die. I must die. I cannot be so unhappy, and live.”

  The answer that came was as brief:

  “My own Désirée: Come home to Valmondé; back to your mother who loves you. Come with your child.”

  When the letter reached Désirée she went with it to her husband’s study, and laid it open upon the desk before which he sat. She was like a stone image: silent, white, motionless after she placed it there.

  In silence he ran his cold eyes over the written words. He said nothing. “Shall I go, Armand?” she asked in tones sharp with agonized suspense.

  “Yes, go.”

  “Do you want me to go?”

  “Yes, I want you to go.”

  He thought Almighty God had dealt cruelly and unjustly with him; and felt, somehow, that he was paying Him back in kind when he stabbed thus into his wife’s soul. Moreover he no longer loved her, because of the unconscious injury she had brought upon his home and his name.

  She turned away like one stunned by a blow, and walked slowly towards the door, hoping he would call her back.

  “Good-by, Armand,” she moaned.

  He did not answer her. That was his last blow at fate.

  Désirée went in search of her child. Zandrine was pacing the sombre gallery with it. She took the little one from the nurse’s arms with no word of explanation, and descending the steps, walked away, under the live-oak branches.

  It was an October afternoon; the sun was just sinking. Out in the still fields the negroes were picking cotton.

  Désirée had not changed the thin white garment nor the slippers which she wore. Her hair was uncovered and the sun’s rays brought a golden gleam from its brown meshes. She did not take the broad, beaten road which led to the far-off plantation of Valmondé. She walked across a deserted field, where the stubble bruised her tender feet, so delicately shod, and tore her thin gown to shreds.

  She disappeared among the reeds and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou; and she did not come back again.

  Some weeks later there was a curious scene enacted at L’Abri. In the centre of the smoothly swept back yard was a great bonfire. Armand Aubigny sat in the wide hallway that commanded a view of the spectacle; and it was he who dealt out to a half dozen negroes the material which kept this fire ablaze.

  A graceful cradle of willow, with all its dainty furbishings, was laid upon the pyre, which had already been fed with the richness of a priceless layette. Then there were silk gowns, and velvet and satin ones added to these; laces, too, and embroideries; bonnets and gloves; for the corbeille had been of rare quality.

  The last thing to go was a tiny bundle of letters; innocent little scribblings that Désirée had sent to him during the days of their espousal. There was the remnant of one back in the drawer from which he took them. But it was not Désirée’s; it was part of an old letter from his mother to his father. He read it. She was thanking God for the blessing of her husband’s love: —

  “But, above all,” she wrote, “night and day, I thank the good God for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.”

  * * *

  1 corbeille] groom’s gifts to bride.

  2 cochon de lait] suckling pig.

  MADAME CÉLESTIN’S DIVORCE

  MADAME CÉLESTIN ALWAYS wore a neat and snugly fitting calico wrapper when she went out in the morning to sweep her small gallery. Lawyer Paxton thought she looked very pretty in the gray one that was made with a graceful Watteau fold at the back: and with which she invariably wore a bow of pink ribbon at the throat. She was always sweeping her gallery when lawyer Paxton passed by in the morning on his way to his office in St. Denis Street.

  Sometimes he stopped and leaned over the fence to say good-morning at his ease; to criticise or admire her rosebushes; or, when he had time enough, to hear what she had to say. Madame Célestin usually had a good deal to say. She would gather up the train of her calico wrapper in one hand, and balancing the broom gracefully in the other, would go tripping down to where the lawyer leaned, as comfortably as he could, over her picket fence.

  Of course she had talked to him of her troubles. Every one knew Madame Célestin’s troubles.

  “Really, madame,” he told her once, in his deliberate, calculating, lawyer-tone, “it ’s more than human nature—woman’s nature—should be called upon to endure. Here you are, working your fingers off”—she glanced down at two rosy finger-tips that showed through the rents in her baggy doeskin gloves—“taking in sewing; giving music lessons; doing God knows what in the way of manual labor to support yourself and those two little ones”—Madame Célestin’s pretty face beamed with satisfaction at this enumeration
of her trials.

  “You right, Judge. Not a picayune, not one, not one, have I lay my eyes on in the pas’ fo’ months that I can say Célestin give it to me or sen’ it to me.”

  “The scoundrel!” muttered lawyer Paxton in his beard.

  “An’ pourtant,”1 she resumed, “they say he ’s making money down roun’ Alexandria w’en he wants to work.”

  “I dare say you have n’t seen him for months?” suggested the lawyer.

  “It ’s good six month’ since I see a sight of Célestin,” she admitted.

  “That ’s it, that ’s what I say; he has practically deserted you; fails to support you. It would n’t surprise me a bit to learn that he has ill treated you.”

  “Well, you know, Judge,” with an evasive cough, “a man that drinks—w’at can you expec’? An’ if you would know the promises he has made me! Ah, if I had as many dolla’ as I had promise from Célestin, I would n’ have to work, je vous garantis.”2

  “And in my opinion, madame, you would be a foolish woman to endure it longer, when the divorce court is there to offer you redress.”

  “You spoke about that befo’, Judge; I ’m goin’ think about that divo’ce. I believe you right.”

  Madame Célestin thought about the divorce and talked about it, too; and lawyer Paxton grew deeply interested in the theme.

  “You know, about that divo’ce, Judge,” Madame Célestin was waiting for him that morning, “I been talking to my family an’ my frien’s, an’ it ’s me that tells you, they all plumb agains’ that divo’ce.”

  “Certainly, to be sure; that’s to be expected, madame, in this community of Creoles. I warned you that you would meet with opposition, and would have to face it and brave it.”

  “Oh, don’t fear, I ’m going to face it! Maman says it ’s a disgrace like it ’s neva been in the family. But it ’s good for Maman to talk, her. W’at trouble she ever had? She says I mus’ go by all means consult with Père Duchéron—it ’s my confessor, you undastan’—Well, I ’ll go, Judge, to please Maman. But all the confessor’ in the worl’ ent goin’ make me put up with that conduc’ of Célestin any longa.”

  A day or two later, she was there waiting for him again. “You know, Judge, about that divo’ce.”

  “Yes, yes,” responded the lawyer, well pleased to trace a new determination in her brown eyes and in the curves of her pretty mouth. “I suppose you saw Père Duchéron and had to brave it out with him, too.”

  “Oh, fo’ that, a perfec’ sermon, I assho you. A talk of giving scandal an’ bad example that I thought would neva en’! He says, fo’ him, he wash’ his hands; I mus’ go see the bishop.”

  “You won’t let the bishop dissuade you, I trust,” stammered the lawyer more anxiously than he could well understand.

  “You don’t know me yet, Judge,” laughed Madame Célestin with a turn of the head and a flirt of the broom which indicated that the interview was at an end.

  “Well, Madame Célestin! And the bishop!” Lawyer Paxton was standing there holding to a couple of the shaky pickets. She had not seen him. “Oh, it ’s you, Judge?” and she hastened towards him with an empressement 3 that could not but have been flattering.

  “Yes, I saw Monseigneur,” she began. The lawyer had already gathered from her expressive countenance that she had not wavered in her determination. “Ah, he ’s a eloquent man. It ’s not a mo’ eloquent man in Natchitoches parish. I was fo’ced to cry, the way he talked to me about my troubles; how he undastan’s them, an’ feels for me. It would move even you, Judge, to hear how he talk’ about that step I want to take; its danga, its temptation. How it is the duty of a Catholic to stan’ everything till the las’ extreme. An’ that life of retirement an’ self-denial I would have to lead,—he tole me all that.”

  “But he has n’t turned you from your resolve, I see,” laughed the lawyer complacently.

  “For that, no,” she returned emphatically. “The bishop don’t know w’at it is to be married to a man like Célestin, an’ have to endu’ that conduc’ like I have to endu’ it. The Pope himse’f can’t make me stan’ that any longer, if you say I got the right in the law to sen’ Célestin sailing.”

  A noticeable change had come over lawyer Paxton. He discarded his work-day coat and began to wear his Sunday one to the office. He grew solicitous as to the shine of his boots, his collar, and the set of his tie. He brushed and trimmed his whiskers with a care that had not before been apparent. Then he fell into a stupid habit of dreaming as he walked the streets of the old town. It would be very good to take unto himself a wife, he dreamed. And he could dream of no other than pretty Madame Célestin filling that sweet and sacred office as she filled his thoughts, now. Old Natchitoches would not hold them comfortably, perhaps; but the world was surely wide enough to live in, outside of Natchitoches town.

  His heart beat in a strangely irregular manner as he neared Madame Célestin’s house one morning, and discovered her behind the rosebushes, as usual plying her broom. She had finished the gallery and steps and was sweeping the little brick walk along the edge of the violet border.

  “Good morning, Madame Célestin.”

  “Ah, it ’s you, Judge? Good morning.” He waited. She seemed to be doing the same. Then she ventured, with some hesitancy, “You know, Judge, about that divo’ce. I been thinking,—I reckon you betta neva mine about that divo’ce.” She was making deep rings in the palm of her gloved hand with the end of the broomhandle, and looking at them critically. Her face seemed to the lawyer to be unusually rosy; but maybe it was only the reflection of the pink bow at the throat. “Yes, I reckon you need n’ mine. You see, Judge, Célestin came home las’ night. An’ he ’s promise me on his word an’ honor he ’s going to turn ova a new leaf.”

  * * *

  1 pourtant] yet.

  2 je vous garantis] I can assure you.

  3 empressement] eagerness.

  LOVE ON THE BON-DIEU

  UPON THE PLEASANT veranda of Père Antoine’s cottage, that adjoined the church, a young girl had long been seated, awaiting his return. It was the eve of Easter Sunday, and since early afternoon the priest had been engaged in hearing the confessions of those who wished to make their Easters the following day. The girl did not seem impatient at his delay; on the contrary, it was very restful to her to lie back in the big chair she had found there, and peep through the thick curtain of vines at the people who occasionally passed along the village street.

  She was slender, with a frailness that indicated lack of wholesome and plentiful nourishment. A pathetic, uneasy look was in her gray eyes, and even faintly stamped her features, which were fine and delicate. In lieu of a hat, a barège veil covered her light brown and abundant hair. She wore a coarse white cotton ‘‘josie,” and a blue calico skirt that only half concealed her tattered shoes.

  As she sat there, she held carefully in her lap a parcel of eggs securely fastened in a red bandana handkerchief.

  Twice already a handsome, stalwart young man in quest of the priest had entered the yard, and penetrated to where she sat. At first they had exchanged the uncompromising “howdy” of strangers, and nothing more. The second time, finding the priest still absent, he hesitated to go at once. Instead, he stood upon the step, and narrowing his brown eyes, gazed beyond the river, off towards the west, where a murky streak of mist was spreading across the sun.

  “It look like mo’ rain,” he remarked, slowly and carelessly.

  “We done had ’bout ’nough,” she replied, in much the same tone.

  “It ’s no chance to thin out the cotton,” he went on.

  “An’ the Bon-Dieu,” she resumed, “it ’s on’y to-day you can cross him on foot.”

  “You live yonda on the Bon-Dieu, donc?” he asked, looking at her for the first time since he had spoken.

  “Yas, by Nid d’Hibout, m’sieur.”

  Instinctive courtesy held him from questioning her further. But he seated himself on the step, evidently determined to wait t
here for the priest. He said no more, but sat scanning critically the steps, the porch, and pillar beside him, from which he occasionally tore away little pieces of detached wood, where it was beginning to rot at its base.

  A click at the side gate that communicated with the churchyard soon announced Père Antoine’s return. He came hurriedly across the garden-path, between the tall, lusty rosebushes that lined either side of it, which were now fragrant with blossoms. His long, flapping cassock added something of height to his undersized, middle-aged figure, as did the skullcap which rested securely back on his head. He saw only the young man at first, who rose at his approach.

  “Well, Azenor,” he called cheerily in French, extending his hand. “How is this? I expected you all the week.”

  “Yes, monsieur; but I knew well what you wanted with me, and I was finishing the doors for Gros-Léon’s new house;” saying which, he drew back, and indicated by a motion and look that some one was present who had a prior claim upon Père Antoine’s attention.

  “Ah, Lalie!” the priest exclaimed, when he had mounted to the porch, and saw her there behind the vines. “Have you been waiting here since you confessed? Surely an hour ago!”

  “Yes, monsieur.”

  “You should rather have made some visits in the village, child.”

  “I am not acquainted with any one in the village,” she returned.

  The priest, as he spoke, had drawn a chair, and seated himself beside her, with his hands comfortably clasping his knees. He wanted to know how things were out on the bayou.

  “And how is the grandmother?” he asked. “As cross and crabbed as ever? And with that”—he added reflectively—“good for ten years yet! I said only yesterday to Butrand—you know Butrand, he works on Le BlÔt’s Bon-Dieu place—‘And that Madame Zidore: how is it with her, Butrand? I believe God has forgotten her here on earth.’ ‘It is n’t that, your reverence,’ said Butrand, ‘but it ’s neither God nor the Devil that wants her!’ ” And Père Antoine laughed with a jovial frankness that took all sting of ill-nature from his very pointed remarks.