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Page 52
When I stole into the parlour, Anson Kirkpatrick, Marshall Field's man, was
at the piano, playing airs from a musical comedy then running in Chicago.
He was a dapper little Irishman, very vain, homely as a monkey, with
friends everywhere, and a sweetheart in every port, like a sailor. I did
not know all the men who were sitting about, but I recognized a furniture
salesman from Kansas City, a drug man, and Willy O'Reilly, who travelled
for a jewellery house and sold musical instruments. The talk was all about
good and bad hotels, actors and actresses and musical prodigies. I learned
that Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha to hear Booth and Barrett, who were to
play there next week, and that Mary Anderson was having a great success in
`A Winter's Tale,' in London.
The door from the office opened, and Johnnie Gardener came in, directing
Blind d'Arnault--he would never consent to be led. He was a heavy, bulky
mulatto, on short legs, and he came tapping the floor in front of him with
his gold-headed cane. His yellow face was lifted in the light, with a show
of white teeth, all grinning, and his shrunken, papery eyelids lay
motionless over his blind eyes.
`Good evening, gentlemen. No ladies here? Good evening, gentlemen. We
going to have a little music? Some of you gentlemen going to play for me
this evening?' It was the soft, amiable Negro voice, like those I
remembered from early childhood, with the note of docile subservience in
it. He had the Negro head, too; almost no head at all; nothing behind the
ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool. He would have been
repulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy. It was the
happiest face I had seen since I left Virginia.
He felt his way directly to the piano. The moment he sat down, I noticed
the nervous infirmity of which Mrs. Harling had told me. When he was
sitting, or standing still, he swayed back and forth incessantly, like a
rocking toy. At the piano, he swayed in time to the music, and when he was
not playing, his body kept up this motion, like an empty mill grinding on.
He found the pedals and tried them, ran his yellow hands up and down the
keys a few times, tinkling off scales, then turned to the company.
`She seems all right, gentlemen. Nothing happened to her since the last
time I was here. Mrs. Gardener, she always has this piano tuned up before
I come. Now gentlemen, I expect you've all got grand voices. Seems like
we might have some good old plantation songs tonight.'
The men gathered round him, as he began to play `My Old Kentucky Home.'
They sang one Negro melody after another, while the mulatto sat rocking
himself, his head thrown back, his yellow face lifted, his shrivelled
eyelids never fluttering.
He was born in the Far South, on the d'Arnault plantation, where the spirit
if not the fact of slavery persisted. When he was three weeks old, he had
an illness which left him totally blind. As soon as he was old enough to
sit up alone and toddle about, another affliction, the nervous motion of
his body, became apparent. His mother, a buxom young Negro wench who was
laundress for the d'Arnaults, concluded that her blind baby was `not right'
in his head, and she was ashamed of him. She loved him devotedly, but he
was so ugly, with his sunken eyes and his `fidgets,' that she hid him away
from people. All the dainties she brought down from the Big House were for
the blind child, and she beat and cuffed her other children whenever she
found them teasing him or trying to get his chicken-bone away from him. He
began to talk early, remembered everything he heard, and his mammy said he
`wasn't all wrong.' She named him Samson, because he was blind, but on the
plantation he was known as `yellow Martha's simple child.' He was docile
and obedient, but when he was six years old he began to run away from home,
always taking the same direction. He felt his way through the lilacs,
along the boxwood hedge, up to the south wing of the Big House, where Miss
Nellie d'Arnault practised the piano every morning. This angered his
mother more than anything else he could have done; she was so ashamed of
his ugliness that she couldn't bear to have white folks see him. Whenever
she caught him slipping away from the cabin, she whipped him unmercifully,
and told him what dreadful things old Mr. d'Arnault would do to him if he
ever found him near the Big House. But the next time Samson had a chance,
he ran away again. If Miss d'Arnault stopped practising for a moment and
went toward the window, she saw this hideous little pickaninny, dressed in
an old piece of sacking, standing in the open space between the hollyhock
rows, his body rocking automatically, his blind face lifted to the sun and
wearing an expression of idiotic rapture. Often she was tempted to tell
Martha that the child must be kept at home, but somehow the memory of his
foolish, happy face deterred her. She remembered that his sense of hearing
was nearly all he had-- though it did not occur to her that he might have
more of it than other children.
One day Samson was standing thus while Miss Nellie was playing her lesson
to her music-teacher. The windows were open. He heard them get up from the
piano, talk a little while, and then leave the room. He heard the door
close after them. He crept up to the front windows and stuck his head in:
there was no one there. He could always detect the presence of anyone in a
room. He put one foot over the window-sill and straddled it.
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