The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume I Part 3

"To-morrow, after they have been fed, I also shall be fed--by kindly stealth;--and I shall not have earned the feeding, in spite of the fact that I know there are hundreds of millions of suns!"

Sometime during the year 1869--the exact date cannot be ascertained--Lafcadio Hearn, nineteen years old, penniless, delicate, half-blind, and without a friend, found himself in the streets of New York.

CHAPTER II

THE ARTIST'S APPRENTICESHIP

It is more than doubtful if any individual amid the hurrying mult.i.tudes swarming in the streets of New York in 1869 and 1870 ever noticed with interest--though many of them must have seen--the shy, shabby boy, Lafcadio Hearn. He was thin to attenuation, for his meals were scant and uncertain; his dress was threadbare, for in all the two years he never possessed enough money to renew the garments he had worn upon landing, and his shabbiness must have been extreme, for he had during the greater part of that period no home other than a carpenter's shop, where a friendly Irish workman allowed him to sleep on the shavings and cook his meals upon the small stove, in return for a little rough book-keeping and running of errands. Yet a few may have turned for a second glance at the dark face and eagle profile of the emaciated, unkempt boy, though unsuspecting that this was one--few in each generation--of those who have dreamed the Dream, and seen the Vision, that here was one of those whom Socrates termed "daemonic." One who had looked in secret places, face to face, upon the magic countenance of the Muse, and was thereafter vowed to the quest of the Holy Cup wherein glows the essential blood of beauty. One who must follow forever in poverty hard after the Dream, leaving untouched on either hand the goods for which his fellows strove; falling at times into the mire, torn by the thorns that others evade, lost often, and often overtaken by the night of discouragement and despair, but rising again from besmirchments and defacings to follow the vision to the end. It is hard for those who have never laboured wearily after the glimmering feet of the bearer of the Cup, who have never touched even the hem of her garment, to understand the spiritual _possession_ of one under the vow. To them in such a career will be visible only the fantastic or squalid episodes of the quest.

What were the boy's thoughts at this period; what his hopes, his aims, or his intentions it is now impossible to know. Merely to keep life in his body taxed his powers, and while much of his time was spent in the refuge of the public libraries he was often so faint from inanition as to be unable to benefit by the books he sought.

The fourth fragment of the autobiography appears to refer to this unhappy period.

INTUITION

I was nineteen years old, and a stranger in the great strange world of America, and grievously tormented by grim realities. As I did not know how to face those realities, I tried to forget them as much as possible; and romantic dreams, daily nourished at a public library, helped me to forget. Next to this unpaid luxury of reading, my chief pleasure was to wander about the streets of the town, trying to find in pa.s.sing faces--faces of girls--some realization of certain ideals.

And I found an almost equal pleasure in looking at the photographs placed on display at the doors of photographers' shops,--called, in that place and time, "galleries." Picture-galleries they were indeed for me, during many, many penniless months.

One day, in a by-street, I discovered a new photographer's shop; and in a gla.s.s case, at the entrance, I beheld a face the first sight of which left me breathless with wonder and delight,--a face incomparably surpa.s.sing all my dreams. It was the face of a young woman wearing, for head-dress, something that looked like an embroidered scarf; and this extraordinary head-dress might have been devised for the purpose of displaying, to artistic advantage, the singular beauty of the features. The gaze of the large dark eyes was piercing and calm; the aquiline curve of the nose was clear as the curve of a sword; the mouth was fine, but firm;--and, in spite of the sensitive delicacy of this face, there was a something accipitrine about it,--something sinister and superb, that made me think of a falcon.... For a long, long time I stood looking at it, and the more I looked, the more the splendid wonder of it seemed to grow--like a fascination. I thought that I would suffer much--ever so much!--for the privilege of worshipping the real woman. But who was she? I dared not ask the owner of the "gallery;" and I could not think of any other means of finding out.

I had one friend in those days,--the only fellow countryman whom I knew in that American town,--a man who had preceded me into exile by nearly forty years,--and to him I went. With all of my boyish enthusiasms he used to feel an amused sympathy; and when I told him about my discovery, he at once proposed to go with me to the photograph-shop.

For several moments he studied the picture in silence, knitting his grey brows with a puzzled expression. Then he exclaimed emphatically,--

"That is not an American."

"What do you think of the face?" I queried, anxiously.

"It is a wonderful face," he answered,--"a very wonderful face. But it is not an American, nor an English face."

"Spanish?" I suggested. "Or Italian?"

"No, no," he returned, very positively. "It is not a European face at all."

"Perhaps a Jewess?"--I ventured.

"No; there are very beautiful Jewish faces,--but none like that."

"Then what can it be?"

"I do not know;--there is some strange blood there."

"How can you tell?" I protested.

"Why, I feel it;--I am quite sure of it.... But wait here a moment!--I know this photographer, and I shall ask him."

And, to my delight, he went in.... Alas! the riddle was not to be solved so quickly as we had hoped. The owner of the picture said that he did not know whose portrait it was. He had bought it, with a number of other "stock-photographs," from a wholesale dealer in photographic wares. It had been taken in Paris; but the card upon which it was now mounted did not bear the name of the French photographer.

Now my friend was a wanderer whose ties with England had been broken before I was born;--he knew the most surprising things about weird places and strange peoples, but had long ceased to feel any interest in the life of the mother country. For that reason, probably, the picture proved not less of a riddle to him than to me. The photographer was a young man who had never left his native state; and his stock-in-trade had been obtained, of course, through an agency. As for myself, I was hopelessly separated, by iron circ.u.mstances, from that ordered society which seeks its pleasures in art and music and drama. Otherwise, how easily might I have learned the name of the marvellous being who had cast that shadow! But many long years went by before I learned it.

I had then forgotten all about the picture. I was in a Southern city, hundreds of miles away; and I happened to be leaning on the counter of a druggist's shop, talking to the druggist, when I suddenly perceived, in a gla.s.s case at my elbow, the very same enigmatic photograph. It had been pasted, as a label, on the lid of some box of cosmetic. And again there tingled, through all my blood, the same thrill of wonder and delight that I had felt as a boy, at the door of that photographer....

"Excuse me for interrupting you a moment," I exclaimed;--"please tell me whose face is that."

The druggist glanced at the photograph, and then smiled--as people smile at silly questions.

"Is it possible that you do not know?" he responded.

"I do not," I said. "Years ago I saw that photograph and I could not find out whose picture it was."

"You are joking!"

"Really I am not," I said;--"and I very much want to know."

Then he told me--but I need not repeat the name of the great tragedienne.... At once flashed back to me the memory of my old friend's declaration:--"_There is some strange blood there._" After all, he was right! In the veins of that wonderful woman ran the blood of Indian kings.

What drove him at the end of the two years to endeavour to reach Cincinnati, Ohio, is not clear. The only light to be gathered upon the subject is from the fifth part of the autobiographical fragments, which suggests that he made the journey in an emigrant train and had not money for food upon the way. After thirty years, the clearest memory of that dolorous pilgrimage was of the distress of being misunderstood by the friendly girl who pitied his sufferings. The record of it bears the t.i.tle of

MY FIRST ROMANCE

There has been sent to me, across the world, a little book stamped, on its yellow cover, with names of Scandinavian publishers,--names sounding of storm and strand and surge. And the sight of those names, worthy of Frost-Giants, evokes the vision of a face,--simply because that face has long been a.s.sociated, in my imagination, with legends and stories of the North--especially, I think, with the wonderful stories of Bjornstjerne Bjornson.

It is the face of a Norwegian peasant-girl of nineteen summers,--fair and ruddy and strong. She wears her national costume: her eyes are grey like the sea, and her bright braided hair is tied with a blue ribbon. She is tall; and there is an appearance of strong grace about her, for which I can find no word. Her name I never learned, and never shall be able to learn;--and now it does not matter. By this time she may have grandchildren not a few. But for me she will always be the maiden of nineteen summers,--fair and fresh from the land of the _Hrimthursar_,--a daughter of G.o.ds and Vikings. From the moment of seeing her I wanted to die for her; and I dreamed of _Valkyrja_ and of _Vala_-maids, of _Freyja_ and of _Gerda_....

--She is seated, facing me, in an American railroad-car,--a third-cla.s.s car, full of people whose forms have become indistinguishably dim in memory. She alone remains luminous, vivid: the rest have faded into shadow,--all except a man, sitting beside me, whose dark Jewish face, homely and kindly, is still visible in profile. Through the window on our right she watches the strange new world through which we are pa.s.sing: there is a trembling beneath us, and a rhythm of thunder, while the train sways like a ship in a storm.

An emigrant-train it is; and she, and I, and all those dim people are rushing westward, ever westward,--through days and nights that seem preternaturally large,--over distances that are monstrous. The light is of a summer day; and shadows slant to the east.

The man beside me says:--

"She must leave us to-morrow;--she goes to Redwing, Minnesota.... You like her very much?--yes, she's a fine girl. I think you wish that you were also going to Redwing, Minnesota?"

I do not answer. I am angry that he should know what I wish. And it is very rude of him, I think, to let me know that he knows.

Mischievously, he continues:--

"If you like her so much, why don't you talk to her? Tell me what you would like to say to her; and I'll interpret for you.... Bah! you must not be afraid of the girls!"