Chita: a Memory of Last Island Part 5

... Her idea of G.o.d had been first defined by the sight of a quaint French picture of the Creation,--an engraving which represented a sh.o.r.eless sea under a black sky, and out of the blackness a solemn and bearded gray head emerging, and a cloudy hand through which stars glimmered. G.o.d was like old Doctor de Coulanges, who used to visit the house, and talk in a voice like a low roll of thunder.... At a later day, when Chita had been told that G.o.d was "everywhere at the same time "--without and within, beneath and above all things,--this idea became somewhat changed. The awful bearded face, the huge shadowy hand, did not fade from her thought; but they became fantastically blended with the larger and vaguer notion of something that filled the world and reached to the stars,--something diaphanous and incomprehensible like the invisible air, omnipresent and everlasting like the high blue of heaven ....

II.

... She began to learn the life of the coast.

With her acquisition of another tongue, there came to her also the understanding of many things relating to the world of the sea She memorized with novel delight much that was told her day by day concerning the nature surrounding her,--many secrets of the air, many of those signs of heaven which the dwellers in cities cannot comprehend because the atmosphere is thickened and made stagnant above them--cannot even watch because the horizon is hidden from their eyes by walls, and by weary avenues of trees with whitewashed trunks. She learned, by listening, by asking, by observing also, how to know the signs that foretell wild weather:--tremendous sunsets, scuddings and bridgings of cloud,--sharpening and darkening of the sea-line,--and the shriek of gulls flashing to land in level flight, out of a still transparent sky,--and halos about the moon.

She learned where the sea-birds, with white bosoms and brown wings, made their hidden nests of sand,--and where the cranes waded for their prey,--and where the beautiful wild-ducks, plumaged in satiny lilac and silken green, found their food,--and where the best reeds grew to furnish stems for Feliu's red-clay pipe,--and where the ruddy sea-beans were most often tossed upon the sh.o.r.e,--and how the gray pelicans fished all together, like men--moving in far-extending semicircles, beating the flood with their wings to drive the fish before them.

And from Carmen she learned the fables and the sayings of the sea,--the proverbs about its deafness, its avarice, its treachery, its terrific power,--especially one that haunted her for all time thereafter: Si quieres aprender a orar, entra en el mar (If thou wouldst learn to pray, go to the sea). She learned why the sea is salt,--how "the tears of women made the waves of the sea,"--and how the sea has ii no friends,--and how the cat's eyes change with the tides.

What had she lost of life by her swift translation from the dusty existence of cities to the open immensity of nature's freedom? What did she gain?

Doubtless she was saved from many of those little bitternesses and restraints and disappointments which all well-bred city children must suffer in the course of their training for the more or less fact.i.tious life of society:--obligations to remain very still with every nimble nerve quivering in dumb revolt;--the injustice of being found troublesome and being sent to bed early for the comfort of her elders;--the cruel necessity of straining her pretty eyes, for many long hours at a time, over grimy desks in gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter in the trees without;--the austere constrains and heavy drowsiness of warm churches, filled with the droning echoes of a voice preaching incomprehensible things;--the progressively augmenting weariness of lessons in deportment, in dancing, in music, in the impossible art of keeping her dresses unruffled and unsoiled. Perhaps she never had any reason to regret all these.

She went to sleep and awakened with the wild birds;--her life remained as unfettered by formalities as her fine feet by shoes. Excepting Carmen's old prayer-book,--in which she learned to read a little,--her childhood pa.s.sed without books,--also without pictures, without dainties, without music, without theatrical amus.e.m.e.nts. But she saw and heard and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens and the earth, is yet eternally new and eternally young with the holiness of beauty,--eternally mystical and divine,--eternally weird: the unveiled magnificence of Nature's moods,--the perpetual poem hymned by wind and surge,--the everlasting splendor of the sky.

She saw the quivering pinkness of waters curled by the breath of the morning--under the deepening of the dawn--like a far fluttering and scattering of rose-leaves of fire;--

Saw the sh.o.r.eless, cloudless, marvellous double-circling azure of perfect summer days--twin glories of infinite deeps inter-reflected, while the Soul of the World lay still, suffused with a jewel-light, as of vaporized sapphire;--

Saw the Sea shift color,--"change sheets,"--when the viewless Wizard of the Wind breathed upon its face, and made it green;--

Saw the immeasurable panics,--noiseless, scintillant,--which silver, summer after summer, curved leagues of beach with bodies of little fish--the yearly ma.s.sacre of migrating populations, nations of sea-trout, driven from their element by terror;--and the winnowing of shark-fins,--and the rushing of porpoises,--and the rising of the grande-ecaille, like a pillar of flame,--and the diving and pitching and fighting of the frigates and the gulls,--and the armored hordes of crabs swarming out to clear the slope after the carnage and the gorging had been done;--

Saw the Dreams of the Sky,--scudding mockeries of ridged foam,--and shadowy stratification of capes and coasts and promontories long-drawn out,--and imageries, multicolored, of mountain frondage, and sierras whitening above sierras,--and phantom islands ringed around with lagoons of glory;--

Saw the toppling and smouldering of cloud-worlds after the enormous conflagration of sunsets,--incandescence ruining into darkness; and after it a moving and climbing of stars among the blacknesses,--like searching lamps;--

Saw the deep kindle countless ghostly candles as for mysterious night-festival,--and a luminous billowing under a black sky, and effervescences of fire, and the twirling and crawling of phosphoric foam;--

Saw the mesmerism of the Moon;--saw the enchanted tides self-heaped in muttering obeisance before her.

Often she heard the Music of the Marsh through the night: an infinity of flutings and tinklings made by tiny amphibia,--like the low blowing of numberless little tin horns, the clanking of billions of little bells;--and, at intervals, profound tones, vibrant and heavy, as of a ba.s.s viol--the orchestra of the great frogs! And interweaving with it all, one continuous shrilling,--keen as the steel speech of a saw,--the stridulous telegraphy of crickets.

But always,--always, dreaming or awake, she heard the huge blind Sea chanting that mystic and eternal hymn, which none may hear without awe, which no musician can learn,--

Heard the h.o.a.ry Preacher,--El Pregonador,--preaching the ancient Word, the word "as a fire, and as a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces,"--the Elohim--Word of the Sea! ...

Unknowingly she came to know the immemorial sympathy of the mind with the Soul of the World,--the melancholy wrought by its moods of gray, the reverie responsive to its vagaries of mist, the exhilaration of its vast exultings--days of windy joy, hours of transfigured light.

She felt,--even without knowing it,--the weight of the Silences, the solemnities of sky and sea in these low regions where all things seem to dream--waters and gra.s.ses with their momentary wavings,--woods gray-webbed with mosses that drip and drool,--horizons with their delusions of vapor,--cranes meditating in their marshes,--kites floating in the high blue.... Even the children were singularly quiet; and their play less noisy--though she could not have learned the difference--than the play of city children. Hour after hour, the women sewed or wove in silence. And the brown men,--always barefooted, always wearing rough blue shirts,--seemed, when they lounged about the wharf on idle days, as if they had told each other long ago all they knew or could ever know, and had nothing more to say. They would stare at the flickering of the current, at the drifting of clouds and buzzard:--seldom looking at each other, and always turning their black eyes again, in a weary way, to sky or sea. Even thus one sees the horses and the cattle of the coast, seeking the beach to escape the whizzing flies;--all watch the long waves rolling in, and sometimes turn their heads a moment to look at one another, but always look back to the waves again, as if wondering at a mystery....

How often she herself had wondered--wondered at the multiform changes of each swell as it came in--transformations of tint, of shape, of motion, that seemed to betoken a life infinitely more subtle than the strange cold life of lizards and of fishes,--and sinister, and spectral. Then they all appeared to move in order,--according to one law or impulse;--each had its own voice, yet all sang one and the same everlasting song. Vaguely, as she watched them and listened to them, there came to her the idea of a unity of will in their motion, a unity of menace in their utterance--the idea of one monstrous and complex life! The sea lived: it could crawl backward and forward; it could speak!--it only feigned deafness and sightlessness for some malevolent end. Thenceforward she feared to find herself alone with it. Was it not at her that it strove to rush, muttering, and showing its white teeth, ... just because it knew that she was all by herself? ... Si quieres aprender a orar, entra en el mar! And Concha had well learned to pray. But the sea seemed to her the one Power which G.o.d could not make to obey Him as He pleased. Saying the creed one day, she repeated very slowly the opening words,--"Creo en un Dios, padre todopoderoso, Criador de cielo y de la tierra,"--and paused and thought. Creator of Heaven and Earth? "Madrecita Carmen," she asked,--"quien entonces hizo el mar?" (who then made the sea?).

--"Dios, mi querida," answered Carmen.--"G.o.d, my darling.... All things were made by Him" (todas las cosas fueron hechas por El).

Even the wicked Sea! And He had said unto it: "Thus far, and no farther." ... Was that why it had not overtaken and devoured her when she ran back in fear from the sudden reaching out of its waves? Thus far....? But there were times when it disobeyed--when it rushed further, shaking the world! Was it because G.o.d was then asleep--could not hear, did not see, until too late?

And the tumultuous ocean terrified her more and more: it filled her sleep with enormous nightmare;--it came upon her in dreams, mountain-shadowing,--holding her with its spell, smothering her power of outcry, heaping itself to the stars.

Carmen became alarmed;--she feared that the nervous and delicate child might die in one of those moaning dreams out of which she had to arouse her, night after night. But Feliu, answering her anxiety with one of his favorite proverbs, suggested a heroic remedy:--

--"The world is like the sea: those who do not know how to swim in it are drowned;--and the sea is like the world," he added.... "Chita must learn to swim!"

And he found the time to teach her. Each morning, at sunrise, he took her into the water. She was less terrified the first time than Carmen thought she would be;--she seemed to feel confidence in Feliu; although she screamed piteously before her first ducking at his hands. His teaching was not gentle. He would carry her out, perched upon his shoulder, until the water rose to his own neck; and there he would throw her from him, and let her struggle to reach him again as best she could. The first few mornings she had to be pulled out almost at once; but after that Feliu showed her less mercy, and helped her only when he saw she was really in danger. He attempted no other instruction until she had learned that in order to save herself from being half choked by the salt water, she must not scream; and by the time she became habituated to these austere experiences, she had already learned by instinct alone how to keep herself afloat for a while, how to paddle a little with her hands. Then he commenced to train her to use them,--to lift them well out and throw them forward as if reaching, to dip them as the blade of an oar is dipped at an angle, without loud splashing;--and he showed her also how to use her feet. She learned rapidly and astonishingly well. In less than two months Feliu felt really proud at the progress made by his tiny pupil: it was a delight to watch her lifting her slender arms above the water in swift, easy curves, with the same fine grace that marked all her other natural motions. Later on he taught her not to fear the sea even when it growled a little,--how to ride a swell, how to face a breaker, how to dive. She only needed practice thereafter; and Carmen, who could also swim, finding the child's health improving marvellously under this new discipline, took good care that Chita should practice whenever the mornings were not too cold, or the water too rough.

With the first thrill of delight at finding herself able to glide over the water una.s.sisted, the child's superst.i.tious terror of the sea pa.s.sed away. Even for the adult there are few physical joys keener than the exultation of the swimmer;--how much greater the same glee as newly felt by an imaginative child,--a child, whose vivid fancy can lend unutterable value to the most insignificant trifles, can transform a weed-patch to an Eden! ... Of her own accord she would ask for her morning bath, as soon as she opened her eyes;--it even required some severity to prevent her from remaining in the water too long. The sea appeared to her as something that had become tame for her sake, something that loved her in a huge rough way; a tremendous playmate, whom she no longer feared to see come bounding and barking to lick her feet. And, little by little, she also learned the wonderful healing and caressing power of the monster, whose cool embrace at once dispelled all drowsiness, feverishness, weariness,--even after the sultriest nights when the air had seemed to burn, and the mosquitoes had filled the chamber with a sound as of water boiling in many kettles. And on mornings when the sea was in too wicked a humor to be played with, how she felt the loss of her loved sport, and prayed for calm! Her delicate const.i.tution changed;--the soft, pale flesh became firm and brown, the meagre limbs rounded into robust symmetry, the thin cheeks grew peachy with richer life; for the strength of the sea had entered into her; the sharp breath of the sea had renewed and brightened her young blood....

... Thou primordial Sea, the awfulness of whose antiquity hath stricken all mythology dumb;--thou most wrinkled diving Sea, the millions of whose years outnumber even the mult.i.tude of thy h.o.a.ry motions;--thou omniform and most mysterious Sea, mother of the monsters and the G.o.ds,--whence shine eternal youth? Still do thy waters hold the infinite thrill of that Spirit which brooded above their face in the Beginning!--still is thy quickening breath an elixir unto them that flee to thee for life,--like the breath of young girls, like the breath of children, prescribed for the senescent by magicians of old,--prescribed unto weazened elders in the books of the Wizards.

III

... Eighteen hundred and sixty-seven;--midsummer in the pest-smitten city of New Orleans.

Heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky bleached from the furnace-circle of the horizon;--the lukewarm river ran yellow and noiseless as a torrent of fluid wax. Even sounds seemed blunted by the heaviness of the air;--the rumbling of wheels, the reverberation of footsteps, fell half-toned upon the ear, like sounds that visit a dozing brain.

Daily, almost at the same hour, the continuous sense of atmospheric oppression became thickened;--a packed herd of low-bellying clouds lumbered up from the Gulf; crowded blackly against the sun; flickered, thundered, and burst in torrential rain--tepid, perpendicular--and vanished utterly away. Then, more furiously than before, the sun flamed down;--roofs and pavements steamed; the streets seemed to smoke; the air grew suffocating with vapor; and the luminous city filled with a faint, sickly odor,--a stale smell, as of dead leaves suddenly disinterred from wet mould,--as of gra.s.ses decomposing after a flood.

Something saffron speckled the slimy water of the gutters; sulphur some called it; others feared even to give it a name! Was it only the wind-blown pollen of some innocuous plant?

I do not know; but to many it seemed as if the Invisible Destruction were scattering visible seed! ... Such were the days; and each day the terror-stricken city offered up its hecatomb to death; and the faces of all the dead were yellow as flame!

"DECEDE--"; "DECEDEE--"; "FALLECIO;"--"DIED." ... On the door-posts, the telegraph-poles, the pillars of verandas, the lamps,--over the government letter-boxes,--everywhere glimmered the white annunciations of death. All the city was spotted with them. And lime was poured into the gutters; and huge purifying fires were kindled after sunset.

The nights began with a black heat;--there were hours when the acrid air seemed to ferment for stagnation, and to burn the bronchial tubing;--then, toward morning, it would grow chill with venomous vapors, with morbific dews,--till the sun came up to lift the torpid moisture, and to fill the buildings with oven-glow. And the interminable procession of mourners and hea.r.s.es and carriages again began to circulate between the centres of life and of death;--and long trains and steamships rushed from the port, with heavy burden of fugitives.

Wealth might flee; yet even in flight there was peril. Men, who might have been saved by the craft of experienced nurses at home, hurriedly departed in apparent health, unconsciously carrying in their blood the toxic principle of a malady unfamiliar to physicians of the West and North;--and they died upon their way, by the road-side, by the river-banks, in woods, in deserted stations, on the cots of quarantine hospitals. Wiser those who sought refuge in the purity of the pine forests, or in those near Gulf Islands, whence the bright sea-breath kept ever sweeping back the expanding poison into the funereal swamps, into the misty lowlands. The watering-resorts became overcrowded;--then the fishing villages were thronged,--at least all which were easy to reach by steamboat or by lugger. And at last, even Viosca's Point,--remote and unfamiliar as it was,--had a stranger to shelter: a good old gentleman named Edwards, rather broken down in health--who came as much for quiet as for sea-air, and who had been warmly recommended to Feliu by Captain Harris. For some years he had been troubled by a disease of the heart.

Certainly the old invalid could not have found a more suitable place so far as rest and quiet were concerned. The season had early given such little promise that several men of the Point betook themselves elsewhere; and the aged visitor had two or three vacant cabins from among which to select a dwelling-place. He chose to occupy the most remote of all, which Carmen furnished for him with a cool moss bed and some necessary furniture,--including a big wooden rocking-chair. It seemed to him very comfortable thus. He took his meals with the family, spent most of the day in his own quarters, spoke very little, and lived so un.o.btrusively and inconspicuously that his presence in the settlement was felt scarcely more than that of some dumb creature,--some domestic animal,--some humble pet whose relation to the family is only fully comprehended after it has failed to appear for several days in its accustomed place of patient waiting,--and we know that it is dead.

IV.

Persistently and furiously, at half-past two o'clock of an August morning, Sparicio rang Dr. La Brierre's night-bell. He had fifty dollars in his pocket, and a letter to deliver. He was to earn another fifty dollars--deposited in Feliu's hands,--by bringing the Doctor to Viosca's Point. He had risked his life for that money,--and was terribly in earnest.

Julien descended in his under-clothing, and opened the letter by the light of the hall lamp. It enclosed a check for a larger fee than he had ever before received, and contained an urgent request that he would at once accompany Sparicio to Viosca's Point,--as the sender was in hourly danger of death. The letter, penned in a long, quavering hand, was signed,--"Henry Edwards."

His father's dear old friend! Julien could not refuse to go,--though he feared it was a hopeless case. Angina pectoris,--and a third attack at seventy years of age! Would it even be possible to reach the sufferer's bedside in time? "Due giorno,--con vento,"--said Sparicio.

Still, he must go; and at once. It was Friday morning;--might reach the Point Sat.u.r.day night, with a good wind ... He roused his housekeeper, gave all needful instructions, prepared his little medicine-chest;--and long before the first rose-gold fire of day had flashed to the city spires, he was sleeping the sleep of exhaustion in the tiny cabin of a fishing-sloop.

... For eleven years Julien had devoted himself, heart and soul, to the exercise of that profession he had first studied rather as a polite accomplishment than as a future calling. In the unselfish pursuit of duty he had found the only possible consolation for his irreparable loss; and when the war came to sweep away his wealth, he entered the struggle valorously, not to strive against men, but to use his science against death. After the pa.s.sing of that huge shock, which left all the imposing and splendid fabric of Southern feudalism wrecked forever, his profession stood him in good stead;--he found himself not only able to supply those personal wants he cared to satisfy, but also to alleviate the misery of many whom he had known in days of opulence;--the princely misery that never doffed its smiling mask, though living in secret, from week to week, on bread and orange-leaf tea;--the misery that affected condescension in accepting an invitation to dine,--staring at the face of a watch (refused by the Mont-de-Piete) with eyes half blinded by starvation;--the misery which could afford but one robe for three marriageable daughters,--one plain dress to be worn in turn by each of them, on visiting days;--the pretty misery--young, brave, sweet,--asking for a "treat" of cakes too jocosely to have its asking answered,--laughing and coquetting with its well-fed wooers, and crying for hunger after they were gone. Often and often, his heart had pleaded against his purse for such as these, and won its case in the silent courts of Self. But ever mysteriously the gift came,--sometimes as if from the hand of a former slave; sometimes as from a remorseful creditor, ashamed to write his name. Only yellow Victorine knew; but the Doctor's housekeeper never opened those sphinx-lips of hers, until years after the Doctor's name had disappeared from the City Directory...

He had grown quite thin,--a little gray. The epidemic had burthened him with responsibilities too multifarious and ponderous for his slender strength to bear. The continual nervous strain of abnormally protracted duty, the perpetual interruption of sleep, had almost prostrated even his will. Now he only hoped that, during this brief absence from the city, he might find renewed strength to do his terrible task.

Mosquitoes bit savagely; and the heat became thicker;--and there was yet no wind. Sparicio and his hired boy Carmelo had been walking backward and forward for hours overhead,--urging the vessel yard by yard, with long poles, through the slime of ca.n.a.ls and bayous. With every heavy push, the weary boy would sigh out,--"Santo Antonio!--Santo Antonio!" Sullen Sparicio himself at last burst into vociferations of ill-humor:--"Santo Antonio?--Ah! santissimu e santu diavulu! ...

Sacramentu paescite vegnu un asidente!--malidittu lu Signuri!" All through the morning they walked and pushed, trudged and sighed and swore; and the minutes dragged by more wearily than the shuffling of their feet. "Managgia Cristo co tutta a croce!" ... "Santissimu e santu diavulu!" ...