VAIN OBLATIONS VAIN OBLATIONS BY KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1914 _Copyright, 1914, by Charles Scribner’s Sons_ _Published March, 1914_ TO J. M. F. AND B. M. F. CONTENTS PAGE _Vain Oblations_ 1 _The Mango-Seed_ 43 _The Wine of Violence_ 83 _On the Staircase_ 127 _The Tortoise_ 177 _The Divided Kingdom_ 233 _The Case of Paramore_ 273 VAIN OBLATIONS As I was with Saxe during the four most desperate weeks of his life, I think I may say that I knew him better than any one else. Those were also the four most articulate weeks, for they were a period of terrible inaction, spent on the decks of ocean steamships. Saxe was not much given to talking, but there was nothing else to do. No book that has ever been written could have held his attention for two minutes. I was with him, for that matter, off and on, until the end. What I have to tell I got partly from my own observation, partly from a good little woman at the Mission, partly from Saxe’s letters, largely from his own lips, and partly from natives. But if I recorded it as it came, unassimilated, unchronologized--one fact often limping into camp six months after its own result--the story would be as unintelligible as the _quipus_ of the Incas. It has taken me three years of steady staring to see the thing whole. I know more about it now--including Saxe--than Saxe ever knew. In point of fact, one of the most significant pieces of evidence did not come in until after his death. (I wish it clearly understood, by the way, that Saxe did not commit suicide.) But, more than that, I have been thinking for three years about Mary Bradford. I could tell you as much about what she suffered--the subtlety and the brutality of her ordeal--as if she were one of my own heroines. God forbid that I should ever think of Mary Bradford as “material”: that I should analyze her, or dramatize her, or look at her with the artist’s squint. If I tell her story, it is because I think it right that we should know what things can be. For the most part, we keep to our own continents: the cruel nations are the insensitive nations, and the squeamish races are kind. But Mary Bradford was the finest flower of New England; ten home-keeping generations only lay between her and the Quest of 1620.