Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 16

CHITA[26] (4), although published after Hearn left New Orleans, properly belongs to that period. It first appeared in much shorter form in the _Times-Democrat_ under the t.i.tle of "Torn Letters." This version met with many warm friends, and the author was urged to enlarge it. He did so, and Harpers accepted the story, publishing it first as a serial in their magazine. With this book came Hearn's first recognition, and because of its success, he was given a commission by Harpers for further studies in the tropics, which eventuated in the volume, "Two Years in the French West Indies."

[26] Copyright, 1889, by Harper and Brothers.

"Chita" is the first glimpse of what Mr. Hearn could write from out himself; for whereas, as always, the plot must be given to him, the thread here is so frail that what we admire and remember is the fabric itself which only Hearn could have woven. In "Chita" he recreates elemental nature. In "Karma" he becomes the conscience of a human being.

Then, for the first time he realizes the spiritual forces which are stronger than life or death, and without which no beauty exists.

A criticism of "Chita" at the time of its publication says:--

"By right of this single but profoundly remarkable book, Mr. Hearn may lay good claim to the t.i.tle of the American Victor Hugo ... so living a book has scarcely been given to our generation." (342.)

Concerning the story, Hearn himself writes as follows:--

"Chita" was founded on the fact of a child saved from the Lost Island disaster by some Louisiana fishing-folk, and brought up by them. Years after a Creole hunter recognized her, and reported her whereabouts to relatives. These, who were rich, determined to bring her up as young ladies are brought up in the South, and had her sent to a convent. But she had lived the free healthy life of the coast, and could not bear the convent; she ran away from it, married a fisherman, and lives somewhere down there now,--the mother of mult.i.tudinous children.

This slight structure of plot gave Hearn the opportunity to paint a marvellous picture. Hundreds of quotations could be given. He is delighted with the rich glory of the tropics, and by his power of word imagery he so reproduces it that with him we too can see and feel it. In this glowing Nature the poisoned beauty of the Orient is forgotten. Take this description:--

The charm of a single summer day on these island sh.o.r.es is something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will best understand me who have seen the splendour of a West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of colour, in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles,--a spirituality, as of eternal tropical spring. It must have been to even such a sky that Xenophanes lifted up his eyes of old when he vowed the Infinite Blue was G.o.d;--it was indeed under such a sky that De Soto named the vastest and grandest of Southern havens Espiritu Santo,--the Bay of the Holy Ghost.

There is a something unutterable in this bright Gulf-air that compels awe,--something vital, something holy, something pantheistic and reverentially the mind asks itself if what the eye beholds is not the [Greek: pneuma] indeed, the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost, the Great Blue Soul of the Unknown.

All, all is blue in the calm,--save the low land under your feet, which you almost forget, since it seems only as a tiny green flake afloat in the liquid eternity of day. Then slowly, caressingly, irresistibly, the witchery of the Infinite grows upon you: out of Time and s.p.a.ce you begin to dream with open eyes,--to drift into delicious oblivion of facts,--to forget the past, the present, the substantial,--to comprehend nothing but the existence of that infinite Blue Ghost as something into which you would wish to melt utterly away for ever.

So it is told that into this perfect peace one August day in 1856, a scarlet sun sank in a green sky, and a moonless night came.

Then the Wind grew weird. It ceased being a breath; it became a Voice moaning across the world hooting,--uttering nightmare sounds,--_Whoo!_--_whoo!_--_whoo!_--and with each stupendous owl-cry the mooing of the waters seemed to deepen, more and more abysmally, through all the hours of darkness.

Morning dawned with great rain: the steamer _Star_ was due that day. No one dared to think of it. "Great G.o.d!" some one shrieked,--"She is coming!"

On she came, swaying, rocking, plunging,--with a great whiteness wrapping her about like a cloud, and moving with her moving,--a tempest-whirl of spray;--ghost-white and like a ghost she came, for her smoke-stacks exhaled no visible smoke--the wind devoured it.

And still the storm grew fiercer. On sh.o.r.e the guests at the hotel danced with a feverish reckless gaiety.

Again the _Star_ reeled, and shuddered, and turned, and began to drag away from the great building and its lights,--away from the voluptuous thunder of the grand piano,--even at that moment outpouring the great joy of Weber's melody orchestrated by Berlioz: _l'Invitatin a la Valse_,--with its marvellous musical swing.

--"Waltzing!" cried the captain. "G.o.d help them!--G.o.d help us all now!... The Wind waltzes to-night, with the Sea for his partner." ...

O the stupendous Valse-Tourbillon! O the mighty Dancer!

One-two--three! From north-east to east, from east to south-east, from south-east to south: then from the south he came, whirling the Sea in his arms....

And so the hurricane pa.s.sed, and the day reveals utter wreck and desolation. "There is plunder for all--birds and men."

At a fishing village on the coast on this same night of the storm Carmen, the good wife of Feliu, dreamed--above the terrors of the tempest which shattered her sleep--once again the dream that kept returning of her little Concha, her first-born who slept far away in the old churchyard at Barcelona. And this night she dreamed that her waxen Virgin came and placed in her arms the little brown child with the Indian face, and the face became that of her dead Conchita.

And Carmen wished to thank the Virgin for that priceless bliss, and lifted up her eyes; but the sickness of ghostly fear returned upon her when she looked; for now the Mother seemed as a woman long dead, and the smile was the smile of fleshlessness, and the places of the eyes were voids and darknesses.... And the sea sent up so vast a roar that the dwelling rocked.

Feliu and his men find the tide heavy with human dead and the sea filled with wreckage. Through this floatage Feliu detects a stir of life ... he swims to rescue a little baby fast in the clutch of her dead mother.

To Carmen it is the meaning of her dream. The child has been sent by the Virgin. The tale leads on through the growing life of Chita. Finally one day Dr. La Brierre, whose wife and child had been lost in the famous storm, is summoned to Viosca's Point to the deathbed of his father's old friend, who is dying of the fever. It is Feliu who brings him. But before they can reach the Point the man has already died. The Doctor remains at Feliu's fishing smack. He feels the sickness of the fever coming over him. Then he sees Chita.... Hers is the face of his dead Adele. Through the fury of the fever, which has now seized him, the past is mingled with the present. He re-lives the agony of that death-storm, re-lives all the horror of that scene, when all that he held dear was swept away--until his own soul pa.s.ses out into the night.

The description of Dr. La Brierre in the throes of the fever is terrible. It is so realistic that one shudders.

TWO YEARS IN THE FRENCH WEST INDIES[27] (6) was the _piece de resistance_ of the sojourn in the tropics. Some of the papers appeared first in _Harper's Magazine_. They are marvellous colour-pictures of the country, its people, its life, its customs, with many of the picturesque legends and the quaintnesses that creep into the heart.

[27] Copyright, 1890, by Harper and Brothers.

"There is not a writer who could have so steeped himself in this languorous Creole life and then tell so well about it. Trollope and Froude give you the hard, gritty facts, and Lafcadio Hearn the sentiment and poetry of this beautiful island." (387.)

More and more is Hearn realizing the necessity of finding new colour. "I hope to be able to take a trip to New Mexico in the summer just to obtain literary material, sun-paint, tropical colour, etc." It is always the intense that his fancy craves, and indeed _must_ have in order to work. "There are tropical lilies which are venomous, but they are more beautiful than the frail and icy white lilies of the North." "Whenever I receive a new and strong impression, even in a dream, I write it down, and afterwards develop it at leisure.... There are impressions of blue light and gold and green, correlated to old Spanish legend, which can be found only south of this line." "I will write you a little while I am gone,--if I can find a little strange bit of tropical colour to spread on the paper,--like the fine jewel-dust of scintillant moth-wings."

"Next week I go away to hunt up some tropical or semi-tropical impressions."

He is bewitched by St. Pierre--"I love this quaint, whimsical, wonderfully coloured little town." On opening the present volume we at once feel how thoroughly sympathetic this whole Nature is to him, how ravished his senses are with all that she portrays.

From Pier 49, East River, New York, we travel with Hearn through days of colour and beauty to the glorious Caribbean Sea, where we sail on to Roseau and St. Pierre. Here the colour is becoming so intense that the eyes are blinded.

The luminosities of tropic foliage could only be imitated in fire. He who desires to paint a West Indian forest,--a West Indian landscape,--must take his view from some great height, through which the colours come to his eye softened and subdued by distance,--toned with blues or purples by the astonishing atmosphere.

... It is sunset as I write these lines, and there are witchcrafts of colour. Looking down the narrow, steep street opening to the bay, I see the motionless silhouette of the steamer on a perfectly green sea,--under a lilac sky,--against a prodigious orange light.

Over her memoried paths we wander with Josephine, and then we pause before the lovely statue which seems a living presence.

She is standing just in the centre of the Savane, robed in the fashion of the First Empire, with gracious arms and shoulders bare: one hand leans upon a medallion bearing the eagle profile of Napoleon.... Seven tall palms stand in a circle around her, lifting their comely heads into the blue glory of the tropic day. Within their enchanted circle you feel that you tread holy ground,--the sacred soil of artist and poet;--here the recollections of memoir-writers vanish away; the gossip of history is hushed for you; you no longer care to know how rumour has it that she spoke or smiled or wept: only the bewitchment of her lives under the thin, soft, swaying shadows of those feminine palms.... Over violet s.p.a.ce of summer sea, through the vast splendour of azure light, she is looking back to the place of her birth, back to beautiful drowsy Trois-Islets,--and always with the same half-dreaming, half-plaintive smile,--unutterably touching....

"Under a sky always deepening in beauty" we steam on to the level, burning, coral coast of Barbadoes. Then on past to Demerara.

We pa.s.s through all the quaint beautiful old towns and islands. We see their wonders of sky and sea and flowers. We see their people and all that great race of the mixed blood.

With dear old Jean-Marie we wait for the return of Les Porteuses, and we hear his call:--

"_Coument ou ye, che? coument ou kalle?_" ... (How art thou, dear?--how goes it with thee?)

And they mostly make answer, "_Toutt douce, che,--et ou?_" (All sweetly, dear,--and thou?) But some, over-weary, cry to him, "_Ah! decharge moin vite, che! moin la.s.se, la.s.se!_" (Unload me quickly, dear; for I am very, very weary.) Then he takes off their burdens, and fetches bread for them, and says foolish little things to make them laugh. And they are pleased and laugh, just like children, as they sit right down on the road there to munch their dry bread.

Again we follow on: this time to La Grande Anse, where we see the powerful surf-swimmers. With the population we turn out to witness the procession of young girls to be confirmed; we see the dances and games; we hear the chants, and the strange music on strange instruments.

At St. Pierre once more we listen to the history of Pere Labat, who in twelve years made his order the richest and most powerful in the West Indies.

"Eh, Pere Labat!--what changes there have been since thy day!...

And all that ephemeral man has had power to change has been changed,--ideas, morals, beliefs, the whole social fabric. But the eternal summer remains,--and the Hesperian magnificence of azure sky and violet sea,--and the jewel-colours of the perpetual hills; the same tepid winds that rippled thy cane-fields two hundred years ago still blow over Sainte-Marie; the same purple shadows lengthen and dwindle and turn with the wheeling of the sun. G.o.d's witchery still fills this land; and the heart of the stranger is even yet snared by the beauty of it; and the dreams of him that forsakes it will surely be haunted--even as were thine own, Pere Labat--by memories of its Eden-summer: the sudden leap of the light over a thousand peaks in the glory of a tropic dawn,--the perfumed peace of enormous azure noons,--and shapes of palm, wind-rocked in the burning of colossal sunsets,--and the silent flickering of the great fire-flies, through the lukewarm darkness, when mothers call their children home.... '_Mi fa.n.a.l Pe Labatt!--mi Pe Labatt ka vini pouend ou!_'"

Then we see the lights of the shrines that will protect us from the Zombi and the Moun-Mo, and all the terrible beings who are filled with witchcraft; and we listen to the tale of that Zombi who likes to take the shape of a lissome young negress.

By this time it is Carnival Week with its dances and games and maskers.

But a little later we are shuddering at the horrible pestilence Verette that has seized the city. A gleam of the old love of horror is caught in the following quotation:--

She was the prettiest, a.s.suredly, among the pretty shop-girls of the Grande Rue,--a rare type of _sang-melee_. So oddly pleasing, the young face, that once seen, you could never again dissociate the recollection of it from the memory of the street. But one who saw it last night before they poured quick-lime upon it could discern no features,--only a dark brown ma.s.s, like a fungus, too frightful to think about.

At the beautiful Savane du Fort our eyes and hearts are gladdened by the quaint sight of the Blanchisseuses with their snowy linen spread out for miles along the river's bank. Their laughter echoes in our ears, and we try to catch the words of their little songs.

One warm and starry, and to us unforgettable, September morning we make the ascent of Mt. Pelee by the way of Morne St. Martin, and on our way we come to know the country that lies all around. Let me quote our sensation as we reach the summit:--