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Children of the Market Place, a novel by Edgar Lee Masters |
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Chapter 46 |
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_ CHAPTER XLVI New Orleans had grown to be a city of 170,000 people. Its commerce was enormous. It was the great entrepot of the continent's sugar and cotton industries. Day by day I stood on the wharves, watching the steamers unload and load, gazing over the busy mass of humanity back of which was labor, black and white, slave and free! The great Mississippi, broad and foul, waking from its sleep in the lowlands above, gathering speed here, feeling the call of the sea, begins to move with increased life. Across from the city are lowlands, sugar refineries, smoke stacks. The negroes call to each other, laugh with spontaneous, childlike humor. The wharf officers, the brokers, pass with intense faces. It is hot. Sweat drips from black faces and from white. Whips crack. Mules trot and stumble over the loose and resounding boards. Heavy wheels rumble. And the life of gambling, drinking, pleasure, crawls about the French quarter, along Canal Street, on Royal Street. The bell in the Cathedral rings. I catch the whiff of flowers. Gulls fly over the muddy water. I think of Douglas far away in Russia, of all my life in its early days, now growing so misty. I am more than thirty-seven; and sometimes I feel weary. I grieve for Dorothy. She has wound herself with tenderness around my heart. But less and less can she share life with me. I go to the Place d'Armes to see the equestrian statue of Jackson which has been erected here since my last visit. It is now called Jackson Square. The St. Louis Cathedral has been largely rebuilt. I wander through the Cabildo again, visit the old cemeteries, read the names of the dead. The scent of strange blossoms affects me poignantly. I stroll through the parks, and I visit the life in the French quarter. Dorothy can drive with me at times, but not for long. Our boy distresses her; and a governess keeps him away much of the time. There are memories all about me. La Fayette has been here. He was in this very Cabildo. The old hero of New Orleans, who blessed Dorothy and me, walked these streets. Now he is long gone. Clay is gone, Webster, Calhoun. The country is at a pause. Hawthorne's friend is President. And Douglas is in St. Petersburg, riding a horse grotesquely, and bringing his western ways into the very presence of the Czar. Sometimes I wonder if Zoe is not alive, if some kind of consummate trick was not played on me. Fortescue did not kill her. He did not seem to me like a man who would commit murder. Why would any one murder Zoe? Might she not have been sold for her loveliness to some man desiring a mistress? No! Zoe would write to me if she were living. Yet I went everywhere in New Orleans searching for Zoe. Often I visited the St. Louis hotel, for there young quadroons and octoroons on sale, tastefully dressed, were inspected by men with all the critical and amorous interest with which a roue would look upon the object of his desire. Their eyes were gazed into, their hair stroked, their limbs caressed and outlined, their busts stared at and touched. Men went mad over these beauties. A story went the rounds that a young man in Virginia fell in love with an octoroon slave while on a visit to a country house. The girl had gone to her mistress for protection, and received it, against the man's advances. But he had returned, saying that he could not live without the girl. The mistress had sold her to him for $1500. Did Zoe meet that fate, and not violence? So I searched the cafes, the places of amusement, the bagnios for Zoe. And into every octoroon's face in which I saw a resemblance to Zoe I peered, hoping that it would be she. For with Dorothy so much ill, and with no one in the world of my own but Dorothy and our boy, I had hours of profound loneliness. In New Orleans this winter I was more lonely than I had ever been in my life. I no longer had to strive, I had money enough. And all the while my real estate investments in Chicago doubled and trebled while I traveled. There were many French in New Orleans; there was reverence there and memory for Bonaparte. There was gladness and exultation now that Louis Napoleon had accomplished a coup d'etat and established a throne upon the ruins of the republic. His soldiers were in the Crimea, fighting as desperately as if great wealth or fame could be won by their valor and death. But it was all for the glory of the French throne! A French monarchy again, after the struggles of Mirabeau, after the agony of Marat, and after the rise of republican principles which Douglas had hailed with delight! If these things could be done with honor and applause, did Douglas deserve the hostility which was rising up against him? Was America so immaculately free that Douglas' subordination of the negro to the welfare of the republic at large should be so severely dealt with? On the bulletin boards in great headlines, the progress of the Crimean War was heralded. The French soldiers were winning imperishable glory. The Light Brigade had died for God and the glory of England in the charge at Balaklava. Cavour had sent the Sardinians to help France and England against the Russians; these were soon to fight for the liberty of Italy. Always liberty and God! Russia had gone to war against the Turks because of a quarrel between the Greek and Latin Christians at Jerusalem. Then the Czar demanded of the Turk the right of a protectorate over all Greek Christians in the Ottoman empire. It was refused. Hence war. And England and France and Cavour's Sardinians are fighting Russia. Perhaps the Latin church is the inspiring cause. Minds and noses concur, and the result is conscience. America is in a distressed condition and growing worse. Politics raves. Malice, destroying forces are abroad. Always war with or without the sword. The Greek Christian must be protected; but the Turk must not be vanquished, his country taken by Russia. Louis Napoleon would win a little glory. England needs the Turk, because she lusts for Egypt and India. France wants Algeria and Morocco. In America the North wants power; the South wants power. Men are anxious for office. Labor has interests at stake; so has manufacturing. Farsighted money makers, imperialists, deploy these factions; parties are formed; the populace is fooled with war records and catch words. Men must be destroyed in order to achieve results--for God and liberty. Among others, Douglas must be destroyed! He has risen from obscurity to be the first man in America in the realm of statecraft. He has been a cabinet maker, a lawyer, a legislator, a judge, a Senator, then a leader, now chairman of the committee on territories. He has perfected political efficiency, introduced the convention system, done for representative government what the reaper has done for the harvest field. He has done this all himself without wealth or family to boost him. He is charged with being clever and resourceful, but no one points to corruption in his life. Is there a statesman in Europe or one in America with a cleaner record? His whole energy has been devoted to the development of the country. He has worked for schools, for colleges, for canals, for railroads, for the quick dissemination of intelligence, for the rule of the people on every subject, including slavery, and for that rule in places of maturing sovereignty, like territories, and in places of complete sovereignty, like states. He is spiritually hard, hates the sap-head, the agitator, the simple-hearted moralist. He is indifferent to slavery, when it stands in the way of his republic building. He knows that slavery cannot thrive in the North. He knows that prairies of corn, hills of iron and coal, fields of wheat are as alien to slavery as the tropics are alien to polar bears and reindeer. He sees a God who works through climate; and he sees that the cotton calls for a certain kind of worker, and corn for another. He did not read and he did not know much of anything of the work of Marx and the Revolutionary Manifesto of 1848. He did not need to. He sensed the materialistic conception of history. He had no horror of slavery, knowing exactly what it was; on the other hand he was falsely accused of trying to plant it in the territories. He was hunted and traduced! Moralists prattled of his lack of a moral nature; envy tracked him, shooting from ambush! He had become rich and famous. He was the first man in his party. He was young and full of power. He might be President. The sanctimonious quoted Scripture against him. "Where a man's treasure is, there will be his heart also," said an enemy in the Senate, referring to the fact that Douglas had married a woman who was a slave owner. Douglas had replied in these manly and tender words: "God forbid that I should be understood by any one as being willing to cast from me any responsibility that now does or has ever attached to any member of-my family. So long as life shall last and I shall cherish with religious veneration the memories and virtues of the sainted mother of my children--so long as my heart shall be filled with paternal solicitude for the happiness of those motherless infants, I implore my enemies who so ruthlessly invade the domestic sanctuary to do me the favor to believe that I have no wish, no aspiration to be considered purer or better than she, who was, or they who are slaveholders." It was while I was in New Orleans that Douglas wrote me a letter regarding the Presidency. "I do not wish to occupy that position," he said. "I think that such a state of things will exist that I shall not desire the nomination. Yet I do not intend to do any act which will deprive me of the control of my own action. Our first duty is to the cause--the fate of individual politicians is of minor consequence. The party is in a distracted condition, and it requires all our wisdom, prudence, and energy to consolidate its power and perpetuate its principles." It was this letter that stirred my reflections as I went about New Orleans reading of conditions in Europe and foolishly searching for Zoe. Moreover, I was beginning to be tired of everything in America, and particularly worn with New Orleans. I longed to be back in Chicago in the fresh air by the lake, away from the steam, the heat, the sensual atmosphere of this southern city. Yet Dorothy could not just now venture into the changeable climate of Lake Michigan. I was forced to stay on for her sake. I continued my wanderings and my thoughts about the city, guiding my business interests in Chicago by correspondence. But at last we started. _ |
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