The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume I Part 35

I wanted to buy a pair of baby bracelets;--so they brought in the baby,--a girl, and therefore (?) having a dress on. The little babies of the other s.e.x wear nothing but circles of silver on arms and ankles.

Sometimes the custom is extended; for the little wife who carried her girl baby to the post-office when I was at Demerara, carried it naked at her hip in the most primitive manner.

This Trinidad baby had absurdly large eyes,--looked supernatural: the mother's eyes magnified. She held up her little arms and I chose two rings. Then she talked to me in--Creole patois! It is the commercial dialect of the poor; and the Hindoos learn it well.

Always truly, LAFCADIO HEARN.

There are palms here over 200 feet high. There are fish here of all the colours of marsh-sunset.

TO ELIZABETH BISLAND

FORT DE FRANCE, MARTINIQUE, July, 1887.

DEAR MISS BISLAND,--Imagine yourself turned into marble, all white,--robed after the fashion of the Directory,--standing forever on a marble pedestal, under an enormous azure day,--encircled by a ring of tall palms, graceful as Creole women,--and gazing always, always, over the summer sea, toward emerald Trois Islets.

That is _Josephine_! I think she looks just like you, "Mamzelle Josephine,"--or Zefine, if you like.

I want to tell you a little story about her,--just a little anecdote somebody told me on the street, which I want to develop into a sketch next week.

It was after the fall of the Second Empire,--after France felt the iron heel of Germany upon her throat.

Far off in this delicious little Martinique, the Republican rage made itself felt;--the huge reaction pa.s.sed over the ocean like a magnetic current. So it happened, in a little while, that the Martinique politicians resolved to do that which had already been done in France,--to obliterate the memories of the Empire.

There was Mamzelle Zefine, _par exemple_!... They put a rope round her beautiful white neck. They prepared to destroy the statue.

Then Somebody rang the Church-bell--(you ought to see the sleepy little church: it makes you want to doze the moment you pa.s.s into its cool shadow). A vast crowd gathered in the Savane.

It was a crowd of women,--mostly women who had been slaves,--quadroons, mulattoesses; the house-servants, the _bonnes_, the nurses and housekeepers of the old days. (You could form no possible idea of this coloured Creole element without seeing it: it does not exist in New Orleans.) They gathered to defend Mamzelle Zefine.

When the Republican officials came with their workmen at sunrise, Mamzelle Zefine was still gazing toward Trois Islets; she was white as ever; her pure cold pa.s.sionate face just as lovely: she seemed totally indifferent to what was about to happen,--she was dreaming her eternal plaintive dream.

But she could well afford to feel indifferent! About her, under the circle of the palms, surged a living sea,--a tide of angry yellow faces, above which flashed the lightning of cane-knives, axes, _couteaux de boucher_. "Ah! li vieu!--laches! cafa'ds! pott'ons! Vos pas cabab toucher li! Touche li--yon tete fois!--Ose toucher li. Capons Republicains! Ose toucher li!"

Mamzelle Zefine still gazed plaintively toward Trois Islets. She must have seemed to that yellow population to live;--for each one she represented some young mistress, some petted child, some memory of the old colonial days. And all the love of the slave for the master--all the strange pa.s.sionate senseless affection of the servant for the Creole family--was stirred to storm by the mere idea of the proposed desecration. The man who should have dared to lay an evil finger upon Josephine that day would have been torn limb from limb in the public square. The officials were frightened and foiled: they pledged their faith that the statue should not be touched.

So they took the ropes away; and they piled flowers at Mamzelle Zefine's white feet; they garlanded her; they twined the crimson jessamines of the tropics about her beautiful white throat.

And she is still here,--always in the circle of the palms, always looking to Trois Islets, always beautiful and sweet as a young Creole maiden,--dreamy, gracious, loving,--with a smile that is like some faint, sweet memory of other days.

Always, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELIZABETH BISLAND

NEW YORK, 1887.

DEAR MISS BISLAND,--Thanks for the gracious little letter. I wish I could see you, and see other friends; but fate forbids. Distances are too enormous; engagements imperative; preparations for coming journey made my head whirl. For I return to the tropics, dear Miss Bisland,--probably forever: I imagine that civilization will behold me no more, except as a visitor at very long intervals. I would like to write you sometimes, praying only that my letters be not ever shown unto newspaper people. You will hear from me soon again. I am off on Friday afternoon, and have not even the necessary time to do what I ought to do in the mere matter of exceedingly small purchases, outfits, etc.

Good-bye, with best regards and something a little more, too.

LAFCADIO HEARN.

I have not seen Krehbiel at all,--was out of town when I returned, and seems to have found no time afterwards.

TO ELIZABETH BISLAND

NEW YORK, 1887.

Your letter reached me just at a time when everything that had seemed solid was breaking up, and substance had become Shadow. It made me very foolish,--made me cry. Your rebuke for the trivial phrase in my letter was very beautiful as well as very richly deserved. But I don't think it is a question of volition. It is necessary to obey the impulses of the Unknown for Art's sake--or rather, you _must_ obey them. The Spahi's fascination by the invisible Forces was purely physical. I think I am right in going: perhaps I am wrong in thinking of making the tropics a home. Probably it will be the same thing over again: impulse and chance compelling another change.

The carriage--no, the New York hack and hackman (no romance or sentimentality about these!)--is waiting to take me to Pier 49, East River. So I must end. But I have written such a ridiculous letter that I shan't put anybody's name to it.

TO GEORGE M. GOULD

SAINT-PIERRE, MARTINIQUE, May, 1888.

DEAR GOULD,--One of your letters, I think a P. Cd., many months ago, caught me in British Guiana, another to-day finds me here. I left N. O.

in June, 1887, and have been travelling since, or at least sojourning in these tropics. I have been sick, too,--have had some trouble fighting the influences of climate, trouble in trying to carry out large plans with absurdly small resources; and have been unable to do my friends justice. How could you think I could have been offended? It was only the other day, in a letter to the editor of _Harper's_, that I referred to one of your delightful colour-theories.

Praise from you I value very highly. As to impress such a mind as yours means to me a great pride and pleasure. I am delighted "Chita" pleased you.

I have written a number of sketches on the West Indies,--some of which may appear in a few months, others later on. It has been a hope of mine to make a unique book on these strange Hesperides, with their singularly mixed races; but I don't know whether I shall be able to carry the project out.

The climate is antagonistic to work. It is a benumbing power, rendering concentrated thought almost out of the question. I can now understand why the tropics have produced so little literature.

We are quarantined and isolated for the present by a long epidemic of small-pox, which among these populations means something as fatal as an Oriental plague. The whites are exempt. But the disease, although on the decline, still prevails to an extent rendering it doubtful when I can get away from here.

I would like much to hear from you when you have time. I am temporarily settled here, and everything goes well enough now, so that I can write regularly.

With best affection, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO GEORGE M. GOULD

GRAND ANSE, MARTINIQUE, June, 1888.

DEAR DR. GOULD,--I am writing you from an obscure, pretty West Indian village, seldom visited by travellers. Tall palms, and a grand roaring sea, blue as lapis lazuli in spite of its motion.

I was certainly even more pleased to hear from you than you could have been at the receipt of my letter;--for in addition to the intellectual and sympathetic pleasure of such a correspondence, the comparative rarity of friendly missives, enhancing their value, lends them certain magnetism difficult to describe,--the sensation, perhaps, of that North, and that Northern vigour of mind which has made the world what it is, and that pure keen air full of the Unknowable Something which has made the Northern Thought.

I seldom have a chance now to read or speak English; and English phrases that used to seem absolutely natural already begin to look somewhat odd to me. Were I to continue to live here for some years more, I am almost sure that I should find it difficult to write English. The resources of the intellectual life are all lacking here,--no libraries, no books in any language;--a mind accustomed to discipline becomes like a garden long uncultivated, in which the rare flowers return to their primitive savage forms, or are smothered by rank, tough growths which ought to be pulled up and thrown away. Nature does not allow you to think here, or to study seriously, or to work earnestly: revolt against her, and with one subtle touch of fever she leaves you helpless and thoughtless for months.

But she is so beautiful, nevertheless, that you love her more and more daily,--that you gradually cease to wish to do aught contrary to her local laws and customs. Slowly, you begin to lose all affection for the great Northern nurse that taught you to think, to work, to aspire. Then, after a while, this nude, warm, savage, amorous Southern Nature succeeds in persuading you that labour and effort and purpose are foolish things,--that life is very sweet without them;--and you actually find yourself ready to confess that the aspirations and inspirations born of the struggle for life in the North are all madness,--that they wasted years which might have been delightfully dozed away in land where the air is always warm, the sea always the colour of sapphire, the woods perpetually green as the plumage of a green parrot.

I must confess I have had some such experiences. It appears to me impossible to resign myself to living again in a great city and in a cold climate. Of course I shall have to return to the States for a while,--a short while, probably;--but I do not think I will ever settle there. I am apt to become tired of places,--or at least of the disagreeable facts attaching more or less to all places and becoming more and more marked and unendurable the longer one stays. So that ultimately I am sure to wander off somewhere else. You can comprehend how one becomes tired of the very stones of a place,--the odours, the colours, the shapes of Shadows, and tint of its sky;--and how small irritations become colossal and crushing by years of repet.i.tion;--yet perhaps you will not comprehend that one can actually become weary of a whole system of life, of civilization, even with very limited experience. Such is exactly my present feeling,--an unutterable weariness of the aggressive characteristics of existence in a highly organized society. The higher the social development, the sharper the struggle. One feels this especially in America,--in the nervous centres of the world's activity. One feels at least, I imagine, in the tropics, where it is such an effort just to live, that one has no force left for the effort to expand one's own individuality at the cost of another's. I clearly perceive that a man enamoured of the tropics has but two things to do:--To abandon intellectual work, or to conquer the fascination of Nature. Which I will do will depend upon necessity. I would remain in this zone if I could maintain a certain position here;--to keep it requires means. I can earn only by writing, and yet if I remain a few years more, I will have become (perhaps?) unable to write. So if I am to live in the tropics, as I would like to do, I must earn the means for it in very short order.