The Quest of the Silver Fleece

by W. E. B. Dubois

  Three times the man passed his hands, wave-like, above the dead. Three times he murmured, and his eyes burned into the shadows, where the girl trembled. Then he turned and went as he had come, his heavy feet crashing through the underbrush, on and on, fainter and fainter, as to the end of the world.

  Zora shook herself from the trance-like horror and passed her hands across her eyes to drive out the nightmare. But, no! there lay the dead upon the hearth with the firelight flashing over her, a bloated, hideous, twisted thing, distorted in the rigor of death. A moment Zora looked down upon her mother. She felt the cold body whence the wandering, wrecked soul had passed. She sat down and stared death in the face for the first time. A mighty questioning arose within, a questioning and a yearning.

  Was Elspeth now at peace? Was Death the Way—the wide, dark Way? She had never thought of it before, and as she thought she crept forward and looked into the fearful face pityingly.

  “Mammy!” she whispered—with bated breath—“Mammy Elspeth!” Out of the night came a whispered answer: “Elspeth! Elspeth!”

  Zora sprang to her feet, alert, fearful. With a swing of her arm, she pulled the great oaken door to and dropped the bar into its place. Over the dead she spread a clean white sheet. Into the fire she thrust pine-knots. They glared in vague red, and shadowy brilliance, waving and quivering and throwing up thin swirling columns of black smoke. Then standing beside the fireplace with the white, still corpse between her and the door, she took up her awful vigil.

  There came a low knocking at the door; then silence and footsteps wandering furtively about. The night seemed all footsteps and whispers. There came a louder knocking, and a voice:

  “Elspeth! Elspeth! Open the door; it’s me.”

  Then muttering and wandering noises, and silence again.

  The child on the bed turned itself, murmuring uneasily in its dreams. And then they came. Zora froze, watching the door, wide-eyed, while the fire flamed redder. A loud quick knock at the door—a pause—an oath and a cry.

  “Elspeth! Open this door, damn you!”

  A moment of waiting and then the knocking came again, furious and long continued. Outside there was much trampling and swearing. Zora did not move; the child slept on. A tugging and dragging, a dull blow that set the cabin quivering; then,—

  “Bang! Crack! Crash!”—the door wavered, splintered, and dropped upon the floor.

  With a snarl, a crowd of some half-dozen white faces rushed forward, wavered and stopped. The awakened child sat up and stared with wide blue eyes. Slowly, with no word, the intruders turned and went silently away, leaving but one late comer who pressed forward.

  “What damned mummery is this?” he cried, and snatching at the sheet, dragged it from the black distorted countenance of the corpse. He shuddered but for a moment he could not stir. He felt the midnight eyes of the girl—he saw the twisted, oozing mouth of the hag, blue-black and hideous.

  Suddenly back behind there in the darkness a shriek split the night like a sudden flash of flame—a great ringing scream that cracked and swelled and stopped. With one wild effort the man hurled himself out the door and plunged through the darkness. Panting and cursing, he flashed his huge revolver—“bang! bang! bang!” it cracked into the night. The sweat poured from his forehead; the terror of the swamp was upon him. With a struggling and tearing in his throat, he tripped and fell fainting under the silent oaks.

  Twenty

  THE WEAVING OF THE SILVER FLEECE

  The Silver Fleece, darkly cloaked and girded, lay in the cotton warehouse of the Cresswells, near the store. Its silken fibres, cramped and close, shone yellow-white in the sunlight; sadly soiled, yet beautiful. Many came to see Zora’s twin bales, as they lay, handling them and questioning, while Colonel Cresswell grew proud of his possession.

  The world was going well with the Colonel. Freed from money cares, praised for his generalship in the cotton corner, able to entertain sumptuously, he was again a Southern gentleman of the older school, and so in his envied element. Yet today he frowned as he stood poking absently with his cane at the baled Fleece.

  This marriage—or, rather, these marriages—were not to his liking. It was a mesalliance of a sort that pricked him tenderly; it savored grossly of bargain and sale. His neighbors regarded it with disconcerting equanimity. They seemed to think an alliance with Northern millions an honor for Cresswell blood, and the Colonel thumped the nearer bale vigorously. His cane slipped along the iron bands suddenly, and the old man lurching forward, clutched in space to save himself and touched a human hand.

  Zora, sitting shadowed on the farther bale, drew back her hand quickly at the contact, and started to move away.

  “Who’s that?” thundered the Colonel, more angry at his involuntary fright than at the intrusion. “Here, boys!”

  But Zora had come forward into the space where the sunlight of the wide front doors poured in upon the cotton bales.

  “It’s me, Colonel,” she said.

  He glared at her. She was taller and thinner than formerly, darkly transparent of skin, and her dark eyes shone in strange and dusky brilliance. Still indignant and surprised, the Colonel lifted his voice sharply.

  “What the devil are you doing here?—sleeping when you ought to be at work! Get out! And see here, next week cotton chopping begins—you’ll go to the fields or to the chain-gang. I’ll have no more of your loafing about my place.”

  Awaiting no reply, the Colonel, already half ashamed of his vehemence, stormed out into the sunlight and climbed upon his bay mare.

  But Zora still stood silent in the shadow of the Silver Fleece, hearing and yet not hearing. She was searching for the Way, groping for the threads of life, seeking almost wildly to understand the foundations of understanding, piteously asking for answer to the puzzle of life. All the while the walls rose straight about her and narrow. To continue in school meant charity, yet she had nowhere to go and nothing to go with. To refuse to work for the Cresswells meant trouble for the school and perhaps arrest for herself. To work in the fields meant endless toil and a vista that opened upon death.

  Like a hunted thing the girl turned and twisted in thought and faced everywhere the blank Impossible. Cold and dreamlike without, her shut teeth held back seething fires within, and a spirit of revolt that gathered wildness as it grew. Above all flew the dream, the phantasy, the memory of the past, the vision of the future. Over and over she whispered to herself: “This is not the End; this can not be the End.”

  Somehow, somewhere, would come salvation. Yet what it would be and what she expected she did not know. She sought the Way, but what way and whither she did not know, she dared not dream.

  One thing alone lay in her wild fancy like a great and wonderful fact dragging the dream to earth and anchoring it there. That was the Silver Fleece. Like a brooding mother, Zora had watched it. She knew how the gin had been cleaned for its pressing and how it had been baled apart and carefully covered. She knew how proud Colonel Cresswell was of it and how daily he had visitors to see it and finger the wide white wound in its side.

  “Yes, sir, grown on my place, by my niggers, sir!” he assured them; and they marvelled.

  To Zora’s mind, this beautiful baled fibre was hers; it typified happiness; it was an holy thing which profane hands had stolen. When it came back to her (as come it must, she cried with clenched hands) it would bring happiness; not the great Happiness—that was gone forever—but illumination, atonement, and something of the power and the glory. So, involuntarily almost, she haunted the cotton storehouse, flitting like a dark and silent ghost in among the workmen, greeting them with her low musical voice, warding them with the cold majesty of her eyes; each day afraid of some last parting, each night triumphant—it was still there!

  The Colonel—Zora already forgotten—rode up to the Cresswell Oaks, pondering darkly. It was bad enough to contemplate Helen’s marriage in distant prospect, but the sudden, almost peremptory desire for marrying at Eastertide, a little les
s than two months away, was absurd. There were “business reasons arising from the presidential campaign in the fall,” John Taylor had telegraphed; but there was already too much business in the arrangement to suit the Colonel. With Harry it was different. Indeed it was his own quiet suggestion that made John Taylor hurry matters.

  Harry trusted to the novelty of his father’s new wealth to make the latter complacent; he himself felt an impatient longing for the haven of a home. He had been too long untethered. He distrusted himself. The devil within was too fond of taking the bit in his teeth. He would remember to his dying day one awful shriek in the night, as of a soul tormenting and tormented. He wanted the protection of a good woman, and sometimes against the clear whiteness of her letters so joyous and generous, even if a bit prim and didactic, he saw a vision of himself reflected as he was, and he feared.

  It was distinctively disconcerting to Colonel Cresswell to find Harry quite in favor of early nuptials, and to learn that the sole objection even in Helen’s mind was the improbability of getting a wedding-gown in time. Helen had all a child’s naive love for beautiful and dainty things, and a wedding-gown from Paris had been her life dream. On this point, therefore, there ensued spirited arguments and much correspondence, and both her brother and her lover evinced characteristic interest in the planning.

  Said Harry: “Sis, I’ll cable to Paris today. They can easily hurry the thing along.”

  Helen was delighted; she handed over a telegram just received from John Taylor. “Send me, express, two bales best cotton you can get.”

  The Colonel read the message. “I don’t see the connection between this and hurrying up a wedding-gown,” he growled. None of them discerned the handwriting of Destiny.

  “Neither do I,” said Harry, who detected yielding in his father’s tone. “But we’d better send him the two prize bales; it will be a fine advertisement of our plantation, and evidently he has a surprise in store for us.”

  The Colonel affected to hesitate, but next morning the Silver Fleece went to town.

  Zora watched it go, and her heart swelled and died within her. She walked to town, to the station. She did not see Mrs. Vanderpool arriving from New Orleans; but Mrs. Vanderpool saw her, and looked curiously at the tall, tragic figure that leaned so dolorously beside the freight car. The bales were loaded into the express car; the train pulled away, its hoarse snorting waking vague echoes in the forest beyond. But to the girl who stood at the End, looking outward to darkness, those echoes roared like the crack of doom. A passing band of contract hands called to her mockingly, and one black giant, laughing loudly, gripped her hand.

  “Come, honey,” he shouted, “you’se a’dreaming! Come on, honey!”

  She turned abruptly and gripped his hand, as one drowning grips anything offered—gripped till he winced. She laughed a loud mirthless laugh, that came pouring like a sob from her deep lungs.

  “Come on!” she mocked, and joined them.

  They were a motley crowd, ragged, swaggering, jolly. There were husky, big-limbed youths, and bold-faced, loud-tongued girls. Tomorrow they would start up-country to some backwoods barony in the kingdom of cotton, and work till Christmas time. today was the last in town; there was craftily advanced money in their pockets and riot in their hearts. In the gathering twilight they marched noisily through the streets; in their midst, wide-eyed and laughing almost hysterically, marched Zora.

  Mrs. Vanderpool meantime rode thoughtfully out of town toward Cresswell Oaks. She was returning from witnessing the Mardi Gras festivities at New Orleans and at the urgent invitation of the Cresswells had stopped off. She might even stay to the wedding if the new plans matured.

  Mrs. Vanderpool was quite upset. Her French maid, on whom she had depended absolutely for five years or more, had left her.

  “I think I want to try a colored maid,” she told the Cresswells, laughingly, as they drove home. “They have sweet voices and they can’t doff their uniform. Helene without her cap and apron was often mistaken for a lady, and while I was in New Orleans a French confectioner married her under some such delusion. Now, haven’t you a girl about here who would do?”

  “No,” declared Harry decisively, but his sister suggested that she might ask Miss Smith at the colored school.

  Again Mrs. Vanderpool laughed, but after tea she wandered idly down the road. The sun behind the swamp was crimsoning the world. Mrs. Vanderpool strolled alone to the school, and saw Sarah Smith. There was no cordiality in the latter’s greeting, but when she heard the caller’s errand her attention was at once arrested and held. The interests of her charges were always uppermost in her mind.

  “Can’t I have the girl Zora?” Mrs. Vanderpool at last inquired.

  Miss Smith started, for she was thinking of Zora at that very instant. The girl was later than usual, and she was momentarily expecting to see her tall form moving languidly up the walk.

  She gave Mrs. Vanderpool a searching look. Mrs. Vanderpool glanced involuntarily at her gown and smiled as she did it.

  “Could I trust you with a human soul?” asked Miss Smith abruptly.

  Mrs. Vanderpool looked up quickly. The half mocking answer that rose involuntarily to her lips was checked. Within, Mrs. Vanderpool was a little puzzled at herself. Why had she asked for this girl? She had felt a strange interest in her—a peculiar human interest since she first saw her and as she saw her again this afternoon. But would she make a satisfactory maid? Was it not a rather dangerous experiment? Why had she asked for her? She certainly had not intended to when she entered the house.

  In the silence Miss Smith continued: “Here is a child in whom the fountains of the great deep are suddenly broken up. With peace and care she would find herself, for she is strong. But here there is no peace. Slavery of soul and body awaits her and I am powerless to protect her. She must go away. That going away may make or ruin her. She knows nothing of working for wages and she has not the servant’s humility; but she has loyalty and pluck. For one she loves there is nothing she would not do; but she cannot be driven. Or rather, if she is driven, it may rouse in her the devil incarnate. She needs not exactly affection—she would almost resent that—but intelligent interest and care. In return for this she will gradually learn to serve and serve loyally. Frankly, Mrs. Vanderpool, I would not have chosen you for this task of human education. Indeed, you would have been my last thought—you seem to me—I speak plainly—a worldly woman. Yet, perhaps—who can tell?—God has especially set you to this task. At any rate, I have little choice. I am at my wits’ end. Elspeth, the mother of this child, is not long dead; and here is the girl, beautiful, unprotected; and here am I, almost helpless. She is in debt to the Cresswells, and they are pressing the claim to her service. Take her if you can get her—it is, I fear, her only chance. Mind you—if you can persuade her; and that may be impossible.”

  “Where is she now?”

  Miss Smith glanced out at the darkening landscape, and then at her watch.

  “I do not know; she’s very late. She’s given to wandering, but usually she is here before this time.”

  “I saw her in town this afternoon,” said Mrs. Vanderpool.

  “Zora? In town?” Miss Smith rose. “I’ll send her to you tomorrow,” she said quietly. Mrs. Vanderpool had hardly reached the Oaks before Miss Smith was driving toward town.

  A small cabin on the town’s ragged fringe was crowded to suffocation. Within arose noisy shouts, loud songs, and raucous laughter; the scraping of a fiddle and whine of an accordion. Liquor began to appear and happy faces grew red-eyed and sodden as the dances whirled. At the edge of the orgy stood Zora, wild-eyed and bewildered, mad with the pain that gripped her heart and hammered in her head, crying in tune with the frenzied music—“the End—the End!”

  Abruptly she recognized a face despite the wreck and ruin of its beauty.

  “Bertie!” she cried as she seized the mother of little Emma by the arm.

  The woman staggered and offered her glass.


  “Drink,” she cried, “drink and forget.”

  In a moment Zora sprang forward and seized the burning liquid in both hands. A dozen hands clapped a devil’s tattoo. A score of voices yelled and laughed. The shriek of the music was drowned beneath the thunder of stamping feet. Men reeled to singing women’s arms, but above the roar rose the song of the voice of Zora—she glided to the middle of the room, standing tip-toed with skirts that curled and turned; she threw back her head, raised the liquor to her lips, paused—and looked into the face of Miss Smith.

  A silence fell like a lightning flash on the room as that white face peered in at the door. Slowly Zora’s hands fell and her eyes blinked as though waking from some awful dream. She staggered toward the woman’s outstretched arms.…

  Late that night the girl lay close in Miss Smith’s motherly embrace.

  “I was going to hell!” she whispered, trembling.

  “Why, Zora?” asked Miss Smith calmly.

  “I couldn’t find the Way—and I wanted to forget.”

  “People in hell don’t forget,” was the matter-of-fact comment. “And, Zora, what way do you seek? The way where?”

  Zora sat up in bed, and lifted a gray and stricken face.

  “It’s a lie,” she cried, with hoarse earnestness, “the way nowhere. There is no Way! You know—I want him—I want nothing on earth but him—and him I can’t ever have.”

  The older woman drew her down tenderly.

  “No, Zora,” she said, “there’s something you want more than him and something you can have!”

  “What?” asked the wondering girl.

  “His respect,” said Sarah Smith, “and I know the Way.”

  Twenty-one

  THE MARRIAGE MORNING

  Mrs. Vanderpool watched Zora as she came up the path beneath the oaks. “She walks well,” she observed. And laying aside her book, she waited with a marked curiosity.