American Gothic, page 58
The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise. “Did you know I might n’t go back?”
“I know everything.”
He gave me at this the longest and strangest look. “Everything?”
“Everything. Therefore did you – ?” But I could n’t say it again.
Miles could, very simply. “No. I did n’t steal.”
My face must have shown him I believed him utterly; yet my hands – but it was for pure tenderness – shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all for nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment. “What then did you do?”
He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his breath, two or three times over, as if with difficulty. He might have been standing at the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some faint green twilight. “Well – I said things.”
“Only that?”
“They thought it was enough!”
“To turn you out for?”
Never, truly, had a person “turned out” shown so little to explain it as this little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a manner quite detached and almost helpless. “Well, I suppose I ought n’t.”
“But to whom did you say them?”
He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped – he had lost it. “I don’t know!”
He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was indeed practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left it there. But I was infatuated – I was blind with victory, though even then the very effect that was to have brought him so much nearer was already that of added separation. “Was it to every one?” I asked.
“No; it was only to – ” But he gave a sick little headshake. “I don’t remember their names.”
“Were they then so many?”
“No – only a few. Those I liked.”
Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent what then on earth was I? Paralysed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the question, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he turned away from me again; which, as he faced toward the clear window, I suffered, feeling that I had nothing now there to keep him from. “And did they repeat what you said?” I went on after a moment.
He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and again with the air, though now without anger for it, of being confined against his will. Once more, as he had done before, he looked up at the dim day as if, of what had hitherto sustained him, nothing was left but an unspeakable anxiety. “Oh yes,” he nevertheless replied – “they must have repeated them. To those they liked,” he added.
There was somehow less of it than I had expected; but I turned it over. “And these things came round – ?”
“To the masters? Oh yes!” he answered very simply. “But I did n’t know they’d tell.”
“The masters? They did n’t – they’ve never told. That’s why I ask you.”
He turned to me again his little beautiful fevered face.
“Yes, it was too bad.”
“Too bad?”
“What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home.”
I can’t name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to such a speech by such a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heard myself throw off with homely force: “Stuff and nonsense!” But the next after that I must have sounded stern enough.
“What were these things?”
My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him avert himself again, and that movement made me, with a single bound and an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous author of our woe – the white face of damnation. I felt a sick swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I saw him, from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination, and on the perception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still to his own eyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax of his dismay into the very proof of his liberation. “No more, no more, no more!” I shrieked to my visitant as I tried to press him against me.
“Is she here?” Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes the direction of my words. Then as his strange “she” staggered me and, with a gasp, I echoed it, “Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!” he with sudden fury gave me back.
I seized, stupefied, his supposition – some sequel to what we had done to Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still than that.
“It’s not Miss Jessel! But it’s at the window – straight before us. It’s there – the coward horror, there for the last time!”
At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled dog’s on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the taste of poison, the wide overwhelming presence. “It’s he?”
I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to challenge him. “Whom do you mean by ‘he’?”
“Peter Quint – you devil!” His face gave again, round the room, its convulsed supplication. “Where?”
They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his tribute to my devotion. “What does that matter now, my own? – what will he ever matter? I have you,” I launched at the beast, “but he has lost you for ever!” Then for the demonstration of my work, “There, there!” I said to Miles.
But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him – it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
Notes
THE TURN OF THE SCREW
1 French: all the more reason.
2 Not an insect, but a one-horse covered carriage.
3 The governess recalls Gothic novels she has read. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) was by Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823). The confined madman or madwoman was a familiar device, perhaps best known from Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë (1816–55).
4 The governess recalls Gothic novels she has read. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) was by Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823). The confined madman or madwoman was a familiar device, perhaps best known from Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë (1816–55).
5 The governess has selected a novel (1751) by Henry Fielding (1707–54) describing a long-suffering, virtuous heroine who is finally made wealthy by an inheritance.
6 Jane Marcet (1769–1858) was the author of textbooks for children.
7 French: witty remark. Goody Gosling may have been the nickname of a woman in the governess’s village.
8 See 1 Samuel 16. Young David (later king) plays his lyre for King Saul, who is troubled by an “evil spirit.”
George Washington Cable (1844–1925)
During the Civil War, George Washington Cable, a native of New Orleans, served as an enlisted man in the Confederate cavalry, and was seriously wounded. After the war, as he began his career as a writer, he became increasingly sympathetic toward the cause of African Americans. Eventually much of his time was spent in civil rights activities. Old Creole Days (1879), from which this story is taken, was widely resented in New Orleans for its frank portrayal of racial issues, and ultimately Cable was forced to leave the South.
In “Jean-Ah Poquelin” Cable describes the time after the Louisiana Purchase (1803) when English-speaking outsiders assumed control of the city. Clearly Cable intends parallels with the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, when again the “hated” American government asserted its authority. In describing Jacques Poquelin’s house as resembling a stranded ammunition wagon, Cable uses a vivid image, not from the remote past, but from his own experience in the war. Thus Cable suggests that Jacques Poquelin’s tragedy has relevance for his own time.
Poquelin’s ruined mansion is the familiar setting of Southern Gothic. In this story of a blighted Creole family, and of outsiders who come to understand it, Cable has constructed a richly symbolic account of the legacy of slavery.
Text: George Washington Cable, Old Creole Days (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883).
Jean-Ah Poquelin
In the first decade of the present century, when the newly established American Government was the most hateful thing in Louisiana – when the Creoles were still kicking at such vile innovations as the trial by jury, American dances, anti-smuggling laws, and the printing of the Governor’s proclamation in English – when the Anglo-American flood that was presently to burst in a crevasse of immigration upon the delta had thus far been felt only as slippery seepage which made the Creole tremble for his footing – there stood, a short distance above what is now Canal Street, and considerably back from the line of villas which fringed the river-bank on Tchoupitoulas Road, an old colonial plantation-house half in ruin.
It stood aloof from civilization, the tracts that had once been its indigo fields1 given over to their first noxious wildness, and grown up into one of the horridest marshes within a circuit of fifty miles.
The house was of heavy cypress, lifted up on pillars, grim, solid, and spiritless, its massive build a strong reminder of days still earlier, when every man had been his own peace officer and the insurrection of the blacks a daily contingency. Its dark, weather-beaten roof and sides were hoisted up above the jungly plain in a distracted way, like a gigantic ammunition-wagon stuck in the mud and abandoned by some retreating army. Around it was a dense growth of low water willows, with half a hundred sorts of thorny or fetid bushes, savage strangers alike to the “language of flowers” and to the botanist’s Greek. They were hung with countless strands of discolored and prickly smilax, and the impassable mud below bristled with chevaux de frise2 of the dwarf palmetto. Two lone forest-trees, dead cypresses, stood in the centre of the marsh, dotted with roosting vultures. The shallow strips of water were hid by myriads of aquatic plants, under whose coarse and spiritless flowers, could one have seen it, was a harbor of reptiles, great and small, to make one shudder to the end of his days.
The house was on a slightly raised spot, the levee of a draining canal. The waters of this canal did not run; they crawled, and were full of big, ravening fish and alligators, that held it against all comers.
Such was the home of old Jean Marie Poquelin, once an opulent indigo planter, standing high in the esteem of his small proud circle of exclusively male acquaintances in the old city; now a hermit, alike shunned by and shunning all who had ever known him. “The last of his line,” said the gossips. His father lies under the floor of the St. Louis Cathedral, with the wife of his youth on one side, and the wife of his old age on the other. Old Jean visits the spot daily. His half-brother – alas! there was a mystery; no one knew what had become of the gentle, young half brother, more than thirty years his junior, whom once he seemed so fondly to love, but who, seven years ago, had disappeared suddenly, once for all, and left no clew of his fate.
They had seemed to live so happily in each other’s love. No father, mother, wife to either, no kindred upon earth. The elder a bold, frank, impetuous, chivalric adventurer; the younger a gentle, studious, bookloving recluse; they lived upon the ancestral estate like mated birds, one always on the wing, the other always in the nest.
There was no trait in Jean Marie Poquelin, said the old gossips, for which he was so well known among his few friends as his apparent fondness for his “little brother.” “Jacques said this,” and “Jacques said that”; he “would leave this or that, or anything to Jacques,” for “Jacques was a scholar,” and “Jacques was good,” or “wise,” or “just,” or “far-sighted,” as the nature of the case required; and “he should ask Jacques as soon as he got home,” since Jacques was never elsewhere to be seen.
It was between the roving character of the one brother, and the bookishness of the other, that the estate fell into decay. Jean Marie, generous gentleman, gambled the slaves away one by one, until none was left, man or woman, but one old African mute.
The indigo-fields and vats of Louisiana had been generally abandoned as unremunerative. Certain enterprising men had substituted the culture of sugar; but while the recluse was too apathetic to take so active a course, the other saw larger, and, at that time, equally respectable profits, first in smuggling, and later in the African slave-trade. What harm could he see in it? The whole people said it was vitally necessary, and to minister to a vital public necessity, – good enough, certainly, and so he laid up many a doubloon, that made him none the worse in the public regard.
One day old Jean Marie was about to start upon a voyage that was to be longer, much longer, than any that he had yet made. Jacques had begged him hard for many days not to go, but he laughed him off, and finally said, kissing him:
“Adieu, ’tit frère.”3
“No,” said Jacques, “I shall go with you.”
They left the old hulk of a house in the sole care of the African mute, and went away to the Guinea coast together.
Two years after, old Poquelin came home without his vessel. He must have arrived at his house by night. No one saw him come. No one saw “his little brother;” rumor whispered that he, too, had returned, but he had never been seen again.
A dark suspicion fell upon the old slave-trader. No matter that the few kept the many reminded of the tenderness that had ever marked his bearing to the missing man. The many shook their heads. “You know he has a quick and fearful temper;” and “why does he cover his loss with mystery?” “Grief would out with the truth.”
“But,” said the charitable few, “look in his face; see that expression of true humanity.” The many did look in his face, and, as he looked in theirs, he read the silent question: “Where is thy brother Abel?”4 The few were silenced, his former friends died off, and the name of Jean Marie Poquelin became a symbol of witchery, devilish crime, and hideous nursery fictions.
The man and his house were alike shunned. The snipe and duck hunters forsook the marsh, and the woodcutters abandoned the canal. Sometimes the hardier boys who ventured out there snake-shooting heard a slow thumping of oar-locks on the canal. They would look at each other for a moment half in consternation, half in glee, then rush from their sport in wanton haste to assail with their gibes the unoffending, withered old man who, in rusty attire, sat in the stern of a skiff, rowed homeward by his white-headed African mute.
“O Jean-ah Poquelin! O Jean-ah! Jean-ah Poquelin!”
It was not necessary to utter more than that. No hint of wickedness, deformity, or any physical or moral demerit; merely the name and tone of mockery: “Oh, Jean-ah Poquelin!” and while they tumbled one over another in their needless haste to fly, he would rise carefully from his seat, while the aged mute, with downcast face, went on rowing, and rolling up his brown fist and extending it toward the urchins, would pour forth such an unholy broadside of French imprecation and invective as would all but craze them with delight.
Among both blacks and whites the house was an object of a thousand superstitions. Every midnight, they affirmed, the feu follet5 came out of the marsh and ran in and out of the rooms, flashing from window to window. The story of some lads, whose words in ordinary statements were worthless, was generally credited, that the night they camped in the woods, rather than pass the place after dark, they saw, about sunset, every window blood-red, and on each of the four chimneys an owl sitting, which turned his head three times round, and moaned and laughed with a human voice. There was a bottomless well, everybody professed to know, beneath the sill of the big front door under the rotten veranda; whoever set his foot upon that threshold disappeared forever in the depth below.
What wonder the marsh grew as wild as Africa! Take all the Faubourg Ste. Marie, and half the ancient city, you would not find one graceless dare-devil reckless enough to pass within a hundred yards of the house after nightfall.
The alien races pouring into old New Orleans began to find the few streets named for the Bourbon princes too strait for them. The wheel of fortune, beginning to whirl, threw them off beyond the ancient corporation lines, and sowed civilization and even trade upon the lands of the Graviers and Girods. Fields became roads, roads streets. Everywhere the leveller was peering through his glass, rodsmen were whacking their way through willow-brakes and rose-hedges, and the sweating Irishmen tossed the blue clay up with their long-handled shovels.
“Ha! that is all very well,” quoth the Jean-Baptistes, feeling the reproach of an enterprise that asked neither co-operation nor advice of them, “but wait till they come yonder to Jean Poquelin’s marsh; ha! ha! ha!” The supposed predicament so delighted them, that they put on a mock terror and whirled about in an assumed stampede, then caught their clasped hands between their knees in excess of mirth, and laughed till the tears ran; for whether the street-makers mired in the marsh, or contrived to cut through old “Jean-ah’s” property, either event would be joyful. Meantime a line of tiny rods, with bits of white paper in their split tops, gradually extended its way straight through the haunted ground, and across the canal diagonally.
“We shall fill that ditch,” said the man in mud-boots, and brushed close along the chained and padlocked gate of the haunted mansion. Ah, Jean-ah Poquelin, those were not Creole boys, to be stampeded with a little hard swearing.
