Lafcadio Hearn Part 8

He had made his body a house of shame, but that very shame had set throbbing subtle, infinite vibrations, a spiritual resonance and response to higher endeavour and hope. He knew himself to be a man again, sane, clear-brained, his deep appreciation of beauty able to rise on the heights of the music of utterance as he poured forth the delight of his soul.

Surely some light from the Louisiana sun must have flashed from the page athwart the gloom of the dusty office of the _Commercial_; some magic, bewitching the senses of the practical, hard-headed editor, inducing him to offer the piece of poetic prose contributed by his "Ozias Midwinter"

correspondent, describing a Louisiana sunrise, to the ordinary reading public of a Cincinnati daily newspaper.

CHAPTER IX NEW ORLEANS

"The infinite gulf of blue above seems a sh.o.r.eless sea, whose foam is stars, a myriad million lights are throbbing and flickering and palpitating, a vast stillness filled with perfume prevails over the land,--made only more impressive by the voices of the night-birds and crickets; and all the busy voices of business are dead. The boats are laid up, cotton presses closed, and the city is half empty. So that the time is really inspiring. But I must wait to record the inspiration in some more energetic climate."

It is by Hearn's letters to Mr. Watkin that we are able to follow his more intimate feelings and mode of life at this period of his career. He was at first extravagantly enthusiastic about the quaint beauty and novelty of his surroundings, the luxuriant vegetation, the warmth of the climate, the charm of the Creole population of the older portion of the city. The wealth of a world, unworked gold in the ore, he declared, was to be found in this half-ruined Southern Paradise; in spite of her pitiful decay, it still was an enchanting city. This rose-coloured view of New Orleans was soon dissipated by pressing financial anxiety.

He had been visiting his uncle, he wrote, and was on the verge of beggary. It was possible, however, to live on fish and vegetables for twenty cents a day. Not long after, we find him begging his old Dad to sell all his books, "except the French ones," and send him the proceeds, as he was in a state of desperation with no friend to help him. The need of money, indeed, so cramped and hindered his movements that he was unable any longer to get material for the "copy" of his newspaper correspondence.

Want of money seems also to have necessitated frequent change of residence. His first card is written from 228 Baronne Street, care of Mrs. Bustellos. In the left-hand corner is the drawing of a raven sitting disconsolate beside a door. Shortly afterwards he describes himself as living in an old house with dovecot-shaped windows shadowed with creeping plants, where we have a picture of him sitting close to the fire, smoking his pipe of "_terre Gambiese_," conjuring up fancies of palm-trees and humming-birds, and perfume-laden winds, while a "voice from the far tropics called to him across the darkness."

It is easy with our knowledge of Hearn to imagine how the money he started with in his pocket from Cincinnati melted away during his sojourn at Memphis, his journey down the Mississippi, and two or three days spent amidst the attractions of the curio shops and restaurants of the Crescent City. Gould mentions indignantly Hearn's "intolerable and brutalising improvidence." Without using language quite so intemperate, it must be acknowledged that he had a most irritating incapacity for mastering the ign.o.ble necessity for making expenditure tally with revenue. The editor of the _Commercial_, being accustomed to deal with the ordinary American journalist, to whom forty dollars was as a fortune, did not reckon apparently with Hearn's Celtic recklessness in the matter of ways and means.

Seven months later, he declared that he hadn't made seven cents by his literary work in New Orleans. His books and clothes were all gone, his shirt was sticking through the seat of his pants, and he could only enjoy a five-cent meal once every two days. At last he hadn't even a penny to buy stamps to mail his letters, and still the _Commercial_ hadn't sent him any supplies. Mr. Watkin's means did not admit of his helping the woe-begone "raven." He was also prevented by business affairs from sending a reply for some weeks.

His silence elicited another post-card, a tombstone this time, surmounted by a crescent moon, with a dishevelled-looking raven perched close by.

"I dream of old, ugly things," Hearn writes years later from j.a.pan, when referring to the possibility of his son being subjected to the poverty and suffering he had experienced himself. "I am alone in an American city; and I've only ten cents in my pocket--and to send off a letter that I must send will take three cents. That leaves me seven cents for the day's food.... The horror of being without employ in an American city appals me--because I remember."

The _Hermes_ of aeschylus ventured the opinion, as an impartial observer of events, that adversity was no doubt salutary for _Prometheus_. The same might be said of most of those touched with Promethean fire. Not only does privation and struggle keep the spark alight, but often blows it into a flame. In spite of hunger and straitened means, Hearn was absorbing impressions on every hand. New Orleans, in the seventies and eighties of last century, presented conditions for the nourishing and expanding of such a genius as his, that were most likely unattainable in any other city in the world.

From an article written by him, ent.i.tled "The Scenes of Cable's Romances," that appeared at this time in the _Century Magazine_, we can conjure up this strange city rising out of the water like a dream, its multi-coloured dilapidated Franco-Spanish houses, with their eccentric facades and quaint shop-signs and names. We can see the Rue Royale, its picturesqueness almost unadulterated by innovation, its gables, eaves, dormers, projecting balconies or verandahs, overtopping or jutting out of houses of every imaginable tint; each window adorned with sap-green batten shutters, and bal.u.s.traded with Arabesque work in wrought iron, framing some monogram of which the meaning is forgotten. We can imagine the little genius wandering along such a street, watching the Indians as they pa.s.sed in coloured blankets, Mexicans in leather gaiters, negresses decked out in green and yellow bandanas, planters in white flannels, American business men in broadcloth and straw hats--sauntering backwards and forwards beneath the quaint arcades, balconies and coloured awnings.

We picture the savannahs and half-submerged cypress-groves on the river bank, the green and crimson sunsets, the star-lit dusks, the sound of the mighty current of the Mississippi as it slipped by under the shadow of willow-planted jungle and rustling orange-groves towards Barataria and the Gulf.

He describes a planter's house, an "antique vision," relic of the feudal splendours of the great cotton and sugar country, endeavouring to hide its ruin amidst overgrown gardens and neglected groves, oak-groves left untouched only because their French Creole owners, though ruined, refused to allow Yankee interlopers to cart them to the sawmill, or to allow them to be sent away to the cities up North.

We follow him as, in his near-sighted, observant way he wandered through the city, listening to the medley of strange tongues peculiar to the great southern port; observing the Chinese in the fruit-market, yellow as bananas, the quadroons with skins like dead gold, swarthy sailors from the Mediterranean coasts and the Levant--from Sicily and Cyprus, Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred cities fringing the coasts of southern Europe, wanderers who have wandered all over the face of the earth, sailors who have sailed all seas, sunned themselves at a hundred tropical ports, casting anchor at last by the levee of New Orleans, under a sky as divinely blue, in a climate as sunny and warm as their own beloved sea. Amongst them all he was able, he imagined, to distinguish some on whose faces lay a shadow of the beauty of the antique world--one, in particular, from Zante, first a sailor, then a vendor; some day, perhaps, a merchant. Hearn immediately purchased some of his oranges, a dozen at six cents.

From the market he made his way to the Spanish cathedral, founded by the representation of His Most Catholic Majesty, Don Andre Alminaster, where plebeian feet were blotting out the escutcheons of the knights of the ancient regime, and the knees of worshippers obliterating their memory from the carven stone.

Side by side with him you find your way to the cotton landing of the levee, thence watch the cotton presses with monstrous heads of living iron and bra.s.s, fifty feet high from their junction with the ground, with their mouths five feet wide, opening six feet from the mastodon teeth in the lower jaw. "The more I looked at the thing," he says, "the more I felt as though its prodigious anatomy had been studied after the anatomy of some extinct animal,--the way those jaws worked, the manner in which those muscles moved. Men rolled a cotton bale to the mouth of the monster. The jaws opened with a loud roar, and so remained. The lower jaw had descended to the level with the platform on which the bale was lying. It was an immense plantation bale. Two black men rolled it into the yawning mouth. The t.i.tan muscles contracted, and the jaws closed silently, steadily, swiftly. The bale flattened, flattened, flattened down to sixteen inches, twelve inches, eight inches, five inches,--positively less than five inches! I thought it was going to disappear altogether. But after crushing it beyond five inches the jaw remained stationary and the monster growled like rumbling thunder. I thought the machine began to look as hideous as one of those horrible yawning heads which formed the gates of the Teocallis at Palenque, through whose awful jaws the sacrificed victims pa.s.sed."

The romance that hung over the French colony of New Orleans appealed to Hearn's love of the picturesque. The small minority, obliged to submit to the rules and laws of the United States, but animated by a feeling of futile rebellion against their rulers, still remaining devoted to their country that had sold them for expediency.

With the sympathy of his Celtic nature he entered into the misery of those who had once been opulent--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 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.

Here for the first time since the France of his youthful days, Hearn mixed with Latins, seldom hearing the English tongue.

During this time, while he was loafing and dreaming, he at various intervals contributed letters to the _Commercial_. Now that his genius has become acknowledged, these "Ozias Midwinter" letters, written in the autumn and winter of 1877 and 1878, are appreciated at their just value; but it would be absurd to say that from the accepted signification of the word they come under the head of satisfactory newspaper reporting.

The American public wanted a clear and dispa.s.sionate view of political affairs in the state of Louisiana, and how they were likely to affect trade in the state of Ohio.

We can imagine an honest Cincinnati citizen puzzling over the following, and wondering what in all creation the "Louisianny" correspondent meant by giving him such rubbish to digest with his morning's breakfast:--

"I think there is some true poetry in these allusions to the snake. Is not the serpent a symbol of grace? Is not the so-called 'line of beauty'

serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of all graceful women? something of undulating shapeliness, something of silent fascination? something of Lilith and Lamia?"

In April, 1878, apparently in response to a demand for news more suited to the exigencies of a daily northern newspaper, came two letters on political questions, written in so bia.s.sed and half-hearted a fashion that it was not surprising to see the next letter from New Orleans signed by another name. So the little man lost his opportunity, an opportunity such as is given to few journalists, situated as he was, of earning a competency and achieving a literary position. He himself acknowledged that his own incompatibility of temper and will were to be credited with most of the adverse circ.u.mstances which beset him so frequently during the course of his life. A little yielding on his part was all that was necessary at this time to enable him to keep his head above water until regular work came his way.

Not long after this catastrophe Hearn attained his twenty-eighth birthday. Alluding to this fact, he says that, looking back to the file of his twenty-eight years, he realised an alarming similarity of misery in each of them, ill-success in every aim, an inability to make headway by individual force against unforeseen and unexpected disappointments.

Indeed, sometimes, when success seemed certain, it was upset by some unantic.i.p.ated obstacle, generally proceeding from his own waywardness and unpractical nature. Some loss of temper, and impatience, which, instead of being restrained and concealed, was shown with stupid frankness, might be credited with a large majority of failures. All this he confessed in one of his characteristic letters addressed to Mr.

Watkin about this time. He then recounts the sufferings he had been through, how he found it impossible to make ten dollars a month when twenty was a necessity for comfortable living. He had been cheated, he said, and swindled considerably, and had cheated and swindled others in retaliation. Then he d.a.m.ns New Orleans and its inhabitants, as later he d.a.m.ned j.a.pan and the j.a.panese. But the real fact was that, with that gipsy-like nature of his, he loved wandering and change of scene; he disliked the monotony of staying beyond a certain time in the same place. "My heart always feels like a bird, fluttering impatiently for the migrating season. I think I could be quite happy if I were a swallow and could have a summer nest in the ear of an Egyptian Colossus, or a broken capital of the Parthenon."

About this time an epidemic of yellow fever swept over the city, desolating the population. Hearn did not fall a victim, but underwent a severe attack of "dengue" fever.

"I got hideously sick, and then well again," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson.

It killed nearly seven thousand people. He describes the pest-stricken city, with its heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky bleached from the furnace circle of the horizon; the slow-running river, its current yellow as a flood of fluid wax, the air suffocating with vapour; and the luminous city filled with a faint, sickly odour--a stale smell as of dead leaves suddenly disinterred from wet mould, and each day the terror-stricken population offering its sacrifice to Death, the faces of the dead yellow as flame! On door-posts, telegraph-poles, pillars of verandahs, lamps over government letter-boxes, glimmered the white enunciations of death. All the city was spotted with them. And lime was poured into the gutters, and huge purifying fires kindled after sunset.

After his attack of fever, unable to regain his strength owing to insufficient food and the unhealthiness of the part of the city where he had elected to live, Hearn's eyesight became affected.

"I went stone blind, had to be helped to a doctor's office--no money, no friends. My best friend was a revolver kept to use in case the doctor failed," he tells his sister.

In "Chita," which, as we have said, is only a bundle of reminiscences, he refers to the suicide of a Spaniard, Ramirez. From his tomb a sinister voice seemed to say, "Go thou and do likewise!"... Then began within that man the ghostly struggle between courage and despair, between darkness and light, which all sensitive natures must wage in their own souls at least once in their lives. The suicide is not a coward, he is an egotist; as he struggled with his own worst self something of the deeper and n.o.bler comprehension of human weakness and human suffering was revealed to him. He flung the lattice shutters apart and looked out. How sweet the morning, how well life seemed worth living, as the sunlight fell through the frost haze outside, lighting up the quaint and chequered street and fading away through faint bluish tints into transparent purples. Verily it is the sun that gladdeneth the infinite world.

CHAPTER X WIDER HORIZONS

"There are no more mysteries--except what are called hearts, those points at which individuals rarely touch each other, only to feel as sudden a thrill of surprise as at meeting a ghost, and then to wonder in vain, for the rest of life, what lies out of soul-sight."[13]

[13] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

The doctor Hearn alludes to in his letter to his sister was Rudolf Matas, a Spaniard, now an eminent physician and a very important person in New Orleans. He did not fail the little man who was brought almost stone blind to his consulting-room that winter of 1876. In six months his eyes were comparatively well, and he was able to return to regular literary work.

Matas always remained Hearn's firm partisan, and was an enthusiastic admirer of his genius; Hearn seems to have reciprocated his affection, and years afterwards addressed some of his most interesting letters from Martinique to his "dear brother and friend Rudolfo Matas." By him he is said to have been told the incidents in the story of "Chita," and to him the book was dedicated.

After the yellow fever had pa.s.sed away "there were plenty of vacancies waiting to be filled," Hearn significantly tells his sister....

A daily newspaper called the _Item_ was at that time issued in New Orleans. A great deal of clipping and paste-pot went to its production, "items" taken from European and American sources filling most of its columns. Hearn described it as a poor little sheet going no farther north than St. Louis.

He was offered the a.s.sistant-editorship; the leisure that he found for literary pursuits on his own account more than compensated for the smallness of the salary. He hoped now to be able to scribble as much as he liked, and to have an opportunity for reading, with a view to more consecutive and concentrated work than mere contributions to daily and weekly newspapers. He also had many opportunities, he said, for mixing with strange characters, invaluable as literary material--Creoles, Spaniards, Mexicans--all that curious, heterogeneous society peculiar to New Orleans.

If in Cincinnati to mix with coloured folk was deemed sufficient to place yourself under the ban of decent society, it was ten times more so in New Orleans; but Lafcadio Hearn, Bohemian and rebel, took the keenest pleasure in outraging public opinion, and challenging scandalous tongues, breaking out of bounds whenever the spirit prompted, and throwing in his lot with people who were looked upon as pariahs and outcasts from the world of so-called respectability.

At one time he took up his abode in a ruined house, under the same roof as a Creole fortune-teller. He describes her room with its darkened windows, skulls and crossbones, and lamp lit in front of a mysterious shrine. This was quite sufficient to a.s.sociate his name with hers, and many were the unfounded rumours--Nemesis of the unfortunate episode with Althea Foley at Cincinnati--which floated northwards regarding the manner of his life.

Some members of a Brahminical Society visited New Orleans about this time. Needless to say that Hearn immediately foregathered with them, and in leisure hours took to studying the theories of the East, the poetry of ancient India, the teachings of the wise concerning "absorption and emotion, the illusions of existence, and happiness as the equivalent of annihilation," maintaining that Buddhism was wiser than the wisest of occidental faiths. He astonished the readers of the _Item_ by weird and mystical articles on the subject of the Orient and oriental creeds, considerably increasing the sale of the little paper, and drawing attention, amongst cultured circles in New Orleans, to his own genius.