Chapter IX: Introduction (4)

The landlord burst into a good-natured laugh, "Ah la drôle!--la vilaine petite drôle! So she made you crazy also. Mon cher, you are not the only one, pardieu! But the idea of returning here on account of one kiss, and then to be too late, after all! She is gone, my friend, gone. God knows where. Such women are birds of passage. You might seek the whole world and never find her; again, you might meet her when least expected. But you are too late. She married the guitarrista."

THE BIRD AND THE GIRL[26]

Suddenly, from the heart of the magnolia, came a ripple of liquid notes, a delirium of melody, wilder than the passion of the nightingale, more intoxicating than the sweetness of the night--the mocking-bird calling to its mate.

"Ah, comme c'est coquet!--comme c'est doux!"--murmured the girl who stood by the gateway of the perfumed garden, holding up her mouth to be kissed with the simple confidence of a child.

"Not so sweet to me as your voice," he murmured, with lips close to her lips, and eyes looking into the liquid jet that shone through the silk of her black lashes.

The little Creole laughed a gentle little laugh of pleasure. "Have you birds like that in the West?" she asked.

"In cages," he said. "But very few. I have seen five hundred dollars paid for a fine singer. I wish you were a little mocking-bird!"

"Why?"

"Because I could take you along with me to-morrow."

"And sell me for five hundred dol--?" (A kiss smothered the mischievous question.)

"For shame!"

"Won't you remember this night when you hear them sing in the cages?--poor little prisoners!"

"But we have none where I am now going. It is all wild out there; rough wooden houses and rough men!--no pets--not even a cat!"

"Then what would you do with a little bird in such a place? They would all laugh at you--would n't they?"

"No; I don't think so. Rough men love little pets."

"Little pets!"

"Like you, yes--too well!"

"Too well?"

"I did not mean to say that."

"But you did say it."

"I do not know what I say when I am looking into your eyes."

"Flatterer!"

The music and perfume of those hours came back to him in fragments of dreams all through the long voyage;--in slumber broken by the intervals of rapid travel on river and rail; the crash of loading under the nickering yellow of pine-fires; the steam song of boats chanting welcome or warning; voices of mate and roustabout; the roar of railroad depots; the rumble of baggage in air heavy with the oily breath of perspiring locomotives; the demands of conductors; the announcement of stations;--and at last the heavy jolting of the Western stage over rugged roads where the soil had a faint pink flush, and great coarse yellow flowers were growing.

So the days and weeks and months passed on; and the far Western village, with its single glaring street of white sand, blazed under the summer sun. At intervals came the United States mail-courier, booted and spurred and armed to the teeth, bearing with him always one small satiny note, stamped with the postmark of New Orleans, and faintly perfumed as by the ghost of a magnolia.

"Smells like a woman--that," the bronzed rider sometimes growled out as he delivered the delicate missive with an unusually pleasant flash in his great falcon eyes--eyes made fiercely keen by watching the horizon cut by the fantastic outline of Indian graves, the spiral flight of savage smoke far off which signals danger, and the spiral flight of vultures which signals death.

One day he came without a letter for the engineer--"She's forgotten you this week, Cap," he said in answer to the interrogating look, and rode away through the belt of woods, redolent of resinous gums and down the winding ways to the plain, where the eyeless buffalo skulls glimmered under the sun. Thus he came and thus departed through the rosiness of many a Western sunset, and brought no smile to the expectant face: "She's forgotten you again, Cap."

And one tepid night (the 24th of August, 18--), from the spicy shadows of the woods there rang out a bird-voice with strange exotic tones: "Sweet, sweet, sweet!"--then cascades of dashing silver melody!--then long, liquid, passionate calls!--then a deep, rich ripple of caressing mellow notes, as of love languor oppressed that seeks to laugh. Men rose and went out under the moon to listen. There was something at once terribly and tenderly familiar to at least One in those sounds.

"What in Christ's name is that?" whispered a miner, as the melody quivered far up the white street.

"It is a mocking-bird," answered another who had lived in lands of palmetto and palm.

And as the engineer listened, there seemed to float to him the flower-odors of a sunnier land;--the Western hills faded as clouds fade out of the sky; and before him lay once more the fair streets of a far city, glimmering with the Mexican silver of Southern moonlight;--again he saw the rigging of masts making cobweb lines across the faces of stars and white steamers sleeping in ranks along the river's crescent-curve, and cottages vine-garlanded or banana-shadowed, and woods in their dreamy drapery of Spanish moss.

"Got something for you this time," said the United States mail-carrier, riding in weeks later with his bronzed face made lurid by the sanguine glow of sunset. He did not say "Cap" this time; neither did he smile. The envelope was larger than usual. The handwriting was the handwriting of a man. It contained only these words:

DEAR--, Hortense is dead. It happened very suddenly on the
night of the 24th. Come home at once.

S--

THE TALE OF A FAN[27]

Pah! it is too devilishly hot to write anything about anything practical and serious--let us dream dreams.

. . . . . . . . .

We picked up a little fan in a street-car the other day--a Japanese fabric, with bursts of blue sky upon it, and grotesque foliage sharply cut against a horizon of white paper, and wonderful clouds as pink as Love, and birds of form as unfamiliar as the extinct wonders of ornithology resurrected by Cuvieresque art. Where did those Japanese get their exquisite taste for color and tint-contrasts?--Is their sky so divinely blue?--Are their sunsets so virginally carnation?--Are the breasts of their maidens and the milky peaks of their mountains so white?

But the fairy colors were less strongly suggestive than something impalpable, invisible, indescribable, yet voluptuously enchanting which clung to the fan spirit-wise--a tender little scent--a mischievous perfume--a titillating, tantalizing aroma--an odor inspirational as of the sacred gums whose incense intoxicates the priests of oracles. Did you ever lay your hand upon a pillow covered with the living supple silk of a woman's hair? Well, the intoxicating odor of that hair is something not to be forgotten: if we might try to imagine what the ambrosial odors of paradise are, we dare not compare them to anything else;--the odor of youth in its pliancy, flexibility, rounded softness, delicious coolness, dove-daintiness, delightful plasticity--all that suggests slenderness graceful as a Venetian wineglass, and suppleness as downy-soft as the necks of swans.

. . . . . . . .

Naturally that little aroma itself provoked fancies;--as we looked at the fan we could almost evoke the spirit of a hand and arm, of phantom ivory, the glimmer of a ghostly ring, the shimmer of spectral lace about the wrist;--but nothing more. Yet it seemed to us that even odors might be analyzed; that perhaps in some future age men might describe persons they had never seen by such individual aromas, just as in the Arabian tale one describes minutely a maimed camel and its burthen which he has never beheld.

There are blond and brunette odors;--the white rose is sweet, but the ruddy is sweeter; the perfume of pallid flowers may be potent, as that of the tuberose whose intensity sickens with surfeit of pleasures, but the odors of deeply tinted flowers are passionate and satiate not, quenching desire only to rekindle it.

There are human blossoms more delicious than any rose's heart nestling in pink. There is a sharp, tart, invigorating, penetrating, tropical sweetness in brunette perfumes; blond odors are either faint as those of a Chinese yellow rose, or fiercely ravishing as that of the white jessamine--so bewitching for the moment, but which few can endure all night in the sleeping-room, making the heart of the sleeper faint.

Now the odor of the fan was not a blond odor:--it was sharply sweet as new-mown hay in autumn, keenly pleasant as a clear breeze blowing over sea foam:--what were frankincense and spikenard and cinnamon and all the odors of the merchant compared with it?--What could have been compared with it, indeed, save the smell of the garments of the young Shulamitess or the whispering robes of the Queen of Sheba? And these were brunettes.

The strength of living perfumes evidences the comparative intensity of the life exhaling them. Strong sweet odors bespeak the vigor of youth in blossom. Intensity of life in the brunette is usually coincident with nervous activity and slender elegance.--Young, slenderly graceful, with dark eyes and hair, skin probably a Spanish olive!--did such an one lose a little Japanese fan in car No.-- of the C. C. R. R. during the slumberous heat of Wednesday morning?

A LEGEND[28]

And it came to pass in those days that a plague fell upon mankind, slaying only the males and sparing the females for some mysterious reason.

So that there was only one man left alive upon the face of the earth.

And he was remarkably fair to behold and comely and vigorous as an elephant.

And feeling the difficulties of his position, the man fled away to the mountains, armed with a Winchester rifle, and lived among the wild beasts of the forest....

And the women pursued after him and surrounded the mountain; and prevailed upon the man, with subtle arguments and pleasant words, that he should deliver himself up into their hands.

And they made a treaty with him, that he should be defended from ill-usage and protected from fury and guarded about night and day with a guard.

And the guard was officered by women who were philosophers, and who cared for nothing in this world beyond that which is strictly scientific and matter of fact, so that they were above all the temptations of this world.

And the man was lodged in a palace, and nourished with all the dainties of the world, but was not suffered to go forth, or to show himself in the streets; forasmuch as he was guarded even as a queen bee is guarded in the hive.

Neither was he suffered to occupy his mind with grave questions or to read serious books or discourse of serious things or to peruse aught that had not been previously approved by the committee of scientific women.

For that which wearieth the brain affecteth the well-being of the body.

And all the day long he heard the pleasant plash of fountain waters and inhaled delicious perfumes, and the fairest women in the world stood before him under the supervision of the philosophers.

And a great army was organized to guard him; and great wars were fought with the women of other nations on his account, so that nine millions and more of strong young women were killed.

But he was not permitted to know any of these things, lest it might trouble his mind; nor was he suffered to hear or behold aught that can be unpleasant to mortal ears.

He was permitted only to gaze upon beautiful things--beautiful flowers and fair women, and matchless statues and marvelous pictures, and graven gems and magical vases, and cunningly devised work of goldsmiths and silversmiths. He was only suffered the music created by the fingers of the greatest musicians and by the throats of the most bewitching of singers.

And once a year out of every ten thousand women in the world the fairest one and the most complete in all things was chosen; and of those chosen ones the fairest and most perfect were again chosen; and out of these again the committee of philosophers selected one thousand; and out of these thousand the man chose three hundred.

For he was the only man in the whole world; and the committee of philosophers ordained that he should be permitted to remain entirely alone for sixty-five days in the year, lest he might be, as it were, talked to death.

At first the man fell occasionally in love and felt unhappy; but as the committee of philosophers always sent unto him women more beautiful and more adorable than any he had seen before, he soon became reconciled to his lot.

And instead of committing the folly of loving one woman in particular, he learned to love all women in general.

And during fifty years he lived such a life as even the angels might envy.

And before he died he had 15,273 children, and 91,638 grandchildren.

And the children were brought up by the nation, and permitted to do nothing except to perfect their minds and bodies.

And in the third generation the descendants of the man had increased even to two millions of males, not including females, who were indeed few, so great was the universal desire for males.

And in the tenth generation there were even as many males as females.

And the world was regenerated.

THE GYPSY'S STORY[29]

The summer's day had been buried in Charlemagne splendors of purple and gold; the Spanish sable of the night glittered with its jewel-belt of stars. The young moon had not yet lifted the silver horns of her Moslem standard in the far east. We were sailing over lukewarm waves, rising and falling softly as the breast of a sleeper; winds from the south bore to us a drowsy perfume of lemon-blossoms; and the yellow lights among the citron trees seemed, as we rocked upon the long swell, like the stars of Joseph's dream doing obeisance. Far beyond them a giant pharos glared at us with its single Cyclopean eye of bloodshot fire, dyeing the face of the pilot crimson as a pomegranate. At intervals the sea amorously lipped the smooth flanks of the vessel with a sharp sound; and ghostly fires played about our prow. Seated upon a coil of rope a guitarrista sang, improvising as he sang, one of those sweetly monotonous ballads which the Andalusian gypsies term soleariyas. Even now the rich tones of that solitary voice vibrate in our memory, almost as on that perfumed sea, under the light of summer stars:

Sera,
Para mi er mayo delirio
Berte y no poerte habla.
Gacho.
Gacho que no hab ya motas
Es un barco sin timon.
Por ti,
Las horitas e la noche
Me las paso sin dormi.
Sereno,
No de oste la boz tan arta
Que quieo dormi y no pueo.
Marina,
Con que te lavas la cara
Que la tienes tan dibina?

Why he told me his story I know not: I know only that our hearts understood each other.

"Of my mother," he said, "I knew little when a child; I only remember her in memories vague as dreams, and perhaps in dreams also. For there are years of our childhood so mingled with dreams that we cannot discern through memory the shadow from the substance. But in those times I was forever haunted by a voice that spoke a tongue only familiar to me in after years, and by a face I do not ever remember to have kissed.

"A clear, dark face, strong and delicate, with sharp crescent brows and singularly large eyes, liquidly black, bending over me in my sleep--the face of a tall woman. There was something savage even in the tenderness of the great luminous eyes--such a look as the hunter finds in the eyes of fierce birds when he climbs to their nests above the clouds; and this dark dream-face filled me with strange love and fear. The hair, flowing back from her temples in long ripples of jet, was confined by a broad silver comb curved and gleaming like a new moon.

"And at last when these dreams came upon me, and the half-fierce, loving eyes looked upon me in the night, I would awake and go out under the stars and sob.

"A vast unrest possessed me; a new heat throbbed in my veins, and I heard forever flute-tones of a strange voice, speaking in an unknown tongue; but far, far off, like the sounds of words broken and borne away in fragments by some wandering wind.

"Ocean breezes sang in my ears the song of waves--of waves chanting the deep hymn that no musician can learn--the mystic hymn whereof no human ear may ever discern the words--the magical hymn that is older than the world, and weirder than the moon.

"The winds of the woods bore me odors of tears of spicy gums and the sounds of bird-voices sweeter than the plaint of running water, and whispers of shaking shadows, and the refrain of that mighty harp-song which the pines sing, and the vaporous souls of flowers, and the mysteries of succubus-vines that strangle the oaks with love.

"Winds also, piercing and cold as Northern eyes, came to me from the abysses of the rocks, and from peaks whose ermine of snow has never since the being of the world felt the pressure of a bird's foot; and they sang Runic chants of mountain freedom, where the lightnings cross their flickerings. And with these winds came also shadows of birds, far circling above me, with eyes fierce and beautiful as the eyes of my dream.

"So that a great envy came upon me of the winds and waves and birds that circle forever with the eternal circling of the world. Nightly the large eyes, half fierce, half tender, glimmered through my sleep: phantom winds called to me, and shadowy seas chanted through their foam-flecked lips runes weird as the Runes of Odin.

"And I hated cities with the hatred of the camel--the camel that sobs and moans on beholding afar, on the yellow rim of the desert, the corpse-white finger of a minaret pointing to the dome of Mahomet's heaven.

"Also I hated the rumble of traffic and the roar of the race for gold; the shadows of palaces on burning streets; the sound of toiling feet; the black breath of towered chimneys; and the vast machines, forever laboring with sinews of brass, and panting with heart of steam and steel.

"Only loved I the eyes of night and the women eyes that haunted me--the silence of rolling plains, the whispers of untrodden woods, the shadows of flying birds and fleeting clouds, the heaving emerald of waves, the silver lamentation of brooks, the thunder roll of that mighty hymn of hexameters which the ocean must eternally sing to the stars.

"Once, and once only, did I speak to my father of the dark and beautiful dream that floated to me on the misty waves of sleep. Once, and once only; for I beheld his face grow whiter than the face of Death.

"Encompassed about by wealth and pleasure, I still felt like a bird in a cage of gold. Books I loved only because they taught me mysteries of sky and sea--the alchemy of suns, the magic of seasons, the marvels of lands to which we long forever to sail, yet may never see. But I loved wild rides by night, and long wrestling with waves silver-kissed by the moon, and the musky breath of woods, where wild doves wandered from shadow to shadow, cooing love. And the strange beauty of the falcon face, that haunted me forever, chilled my heart to the sun-haired maidens who sought our home, fair like tall idols of ivory and gold.

"Often, in the first pinkness of dawn, I rose from a restless sleep to look upon a mirror; thirsting to find in my own eyes some dark kindred with the eyes of my dreams; and often I felt in my veins the blood of a strange race, not my father's.

"I saw birds flying to the perfumed South; I watched the sea gulls seeking warmer coasts; I cursed the hawks for their freedom--I cursed the riches that were the price of my bondage to civilization, the pleasures that were the guerdon of my isolation among a people not my own.

--"'O that I were a cloud,' I cried, 'to drift forever with the hollow wind!--O that I were a wave to pass from ocean to ocean, and chant my freedom in foam upon the rocks of a thousand coasts!--O that I might live even as the eagle, who may look into the face of the everlasting sun!'

"So the summer of my life came upon me, with a madness of longing for freedom--a freedom as of winds and waves and birds--and a vague love for that unknown people whose wild blood made fever in my veins,--until one starless night I fled my home forever.

"I slumbered in the woods at last; the birds were singing in the emerald shadows above when I awoke. A tall girl, lithe as a palm, swarthy as Egypt, was gazing upon me. My heart almost ceased to beat. I beheld in the wild beauty of her dark face as it were the shadow of the face that had haunted me; and in the midnight of her eyes the eyes of my dream. Circles of thin gold were in her ears;--her brown arms and feet were bare. She smiled not; but, keeping her great wild eyes fixed upon mine, addressed me in a strange tongue. Strange as India--yet not all strange to me; for at the sound of its savage syllables dusky chambers of memory long un visited reopened their doors and revealed forgotten things. The tongue was the tongue spoken to me in dreams through all those restless years. And she, perceiving that I understood, although I spoke not, pointed to far tents beyond the trees, and ascending spirals of lazy smoke.

"'Whithersoever we go, thou shalt also go,' she murmured. 'Thou art of our people; the blood that flows in thy veins is also mine. We have long waited and watched for thee, summer by summer, in those months when the great longing comes upon us all. For thy mother was of my people; and thou who hast sucked her breasts mayst not live with the pale children of another race. The heaven is our tent; the birds guide our footsteps south and north; the stars lead us to the east and west. My people have sought word of thee even while wandering in lands of sunrise. Our blood is stronger than wine; our kindred dearer than gold. Thou wilt leave riches, pleasures, honors, and the life of cities for thy heart's sake; and I will be thy sister.'

"And I, having kissed her, followed her to the tents of her people--my people--the world wanderers of the most ancient East."

THE ONE PILL-BOX[30]

Like Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, the sun seemed to blaze with sevenfold heat; the sky glowed like steel in the process of blistering; a haze yellow as the radiance above a crucible gilded the streets; the great plants swooned in the garden--fainting flowers laid their heads on the dry clay; the winds were dead; the Yellow Plague filled the city with invisible exhalations of death. A silence as of cemeteries weighed down upon the place; commerce slept a wasting slumber; the iron muscles and brazen bones of wealth machinery relaxed, and lungs of steel ceased their panting; the ships had spread their white wings and flown; the wharves were desolate; the cotton-presses ceased their mighty mastication, and no longer uttered their titanic sighs.

The English mill-master had remained at his post, with the obstinate courage of his race, until stricken down. There was a sound in his ears as of rushing waters; darkness before his eyes: the whispering of the nurses, the orders of the physicians, the tinkling of glasses and spoons, the bubbling of medicine poured out, the sound of doors softly opened and closed, and of visits made on tiptoe, he no longer heard or remembered. The last object his eyes had rested upon was a tiny white-and-red pill-box, lying on the little table beside the bed.

The past came to him in shadowy pictures between dark intervals of half-conscious suffering--of such violent pain in thighs and loins as he remembered to have felt long years before after some frightful fall from a broken scaffolding. The sound in his ears of rushing water gradually sharpened into a keener sound--like the hum of machinery, like the purring of revolving saws, gnawing their meal of odorous wood with invisibly rapid teeth. Odors of cypress and pine, walnut and oak, seemed to float to his nostrils--with sounds of planing and beveling, hammering and polishing, subdued laughter of workmen, loud orders, hurrying feet, and above all the sharp, trilling purr of the hungry saws, and the shaking rumble of the hundred-handed engines.

He was again in the little office, fresh with odors of resinous woods--seated at the tall desk whose thin legs trembled with the palpitation of the engine's heart. It seemed to him there was a vast press of work to be done--enormous efforts to be made--intricate contracts to be unknotted--huge estimates to be made out--agonizing errors to be remedied--frightful miscalculations to be corrected--a world of anxious faces impatiently watching him. Figures and diagrams swam before his eyes--plans of façades--mathematical calculations for stairways--difficult angles of roofs--puzzling arrangements of corridors. The drawings seemed to vary their shape with fantastic spitefulness; squares lengthened into parallelograms and distorted themselves into rhomboids--circles mockingly formed themselves into ciphers--triangles became superimposed, like the necromantic six-pointed star. Then numerals mingled with the drawings--columns of magical figures which could never be added up, because they seemed to lengthen themselves at will with serpent elasticity--a mad procession of confused notes in addition and subtraction, in division and multiplication, danced before him. And the world of anxious faces watched yet more impatiently.

All was dark again; the merciless pain in loins and thighs had returned with sharp consciousness of the fever, and the insufferable heat and skull-splitting headache--heavy blankets and miserable helplessness--and the recollection of the very, very small pill-box on the table. Then it seemed to him there were other pill-boxes--three! nine! twenty-seven! eight-one! one hundred and sixty-two! one hundred and sixty-two very small pill-boxes.

He seemed to be wandering in a cemetery, under blazing sunlight and in a blinding glare of white-washed washed tombs, whose skeletons of brick were left bare in leprous patches by the falling away of the plastering. And, wandering, he came to a deep wall, catacombed from base to summit with the resting-places of ten thousand dead; and there was one empty place--one black void--inscribed with a name strangely like his own. And a great weariness and faintness came upon him; and the pains, returning, carried back his thoughts to the warmth and dimness of the sick-room.

It seemed to him that this could not be death--he was too weary even to die! But they would put him into the hollow void in the wall!--they might: he would not resist, he felt no fear. He could rest there very well even for a hundred years. He had a gimlet somewhere!--they would let him take it with him;--he could bore a tiny little hole in the wall so that a thread of sunlight would creep into his resting-place every day, and he could hear the voices of the world about him. Yet perhaps he should never be able to leave that dark damp place again!--It was very possible; seeing that he was so tired. And there was so much to be arranged first: there were estimates and plans and contracts; and nobody else could make them out; and everything would be left in such confusion! And perhaps he might not even be able to think in a little while; all the knowledge he had stored up would be lost; nobody could think much or say much after having been buried. And he thought again of the pill-boxes--one hundred and sixty-two very small pill-boxes. No; there were exactly three hundred and sixty-six! Perhaps that was because it was leap year.

Everything must be arranged at once!--at once! The pill-boxes would do; he could breathe his thoughts into them and close them tightly--recollections of estimates, corrections of plans, directions to the stair-builders, understanding with contractors, orders to the lumber dealers, instructions to Texan and Mississippi agents, answers to anxious architects, messages to the senior partner, explanations to the firm of X and W. Then it seemed to him that each little box received its deposit of memories, and became light as flame, buoyant as a bubble;--rising in the air to float halfway between floor and ceiling. A great anxiety suddenly came upon him;--the windows were all open, and the opening of the door might cause a current. All these little thoughts would float away!--yet he could not rise to lock the door! The boxes were all there, floating above him light as motes in a sunbeam:--there were so many now that he could not count them! If the nurse would only stay away!... Then all became dark again--a darkness as of solid ebony, heavy, crushing, black, blank, universal...

All lost! Brutally the door opened and closed again with a cruel clap of thunder.... Yellow lightnings played circling before his eyes.... The pill-boxes were gone! But was not that the face of the doctor, anxious and kindly? The burning day was dead; the sick man turned his eyes to the open windows, and beheld the fathomless purple of the night, and the milky blossoms of the stars. And he strove to speak, but could not! The light of a shaded lamp falling upon the table illuminated a tiny object, blood-scarlet by day, carmine under the saffron artificial light. _There was only one pill-box._

A RIVER REVERIE[31]

An old Western river port, lying in a wrinkle of the hills--a sharp slope down to the yellow water, glowing under the sun like molten bronze--a broken hollow square of buildings framing it in, whose basements had been made green by the lipping of water during inundations periodical as the rising of the Nile--a cannonade-rumble of drays over the boulders, and muffled-drum thumping of cotton bales--white signs black-lettered with names of steamboat companies, and the green lattice-work of saloon doors flanked by empty kegs--above, church spires cutting the blue--below, on the slope, hogsheads, bales, drays, cases, boxes, barrels, kegs, mules, wagons, policemen, loungers, and roustabouts, whose apparel is at once as picturesque, as ragged, and as colorless as the fronts of their favorite haunts on the water-front. Westward the purple of softly-rolling hills beyond the flood, through a diaphanous veil of golden haze--a marshaled array of white boats with arabesque lightness of painted woodwork, and a long and irregular line of smoking chimneys. The scene never varied save with the varying tints of weather and season. Sometimes the hills were gray through an atmosphere of rain--sometimes they vanished altogether in an autumn fog; but the port never changed. And in summer or spring, at the foot of the iron stairway leading up to a steamboat agency in the great middle building facing the river, there was a folding stool--which no one ever tried to steal--which even the most hardened wharf thieves respected--and on that stool, at the same hour every day, a pleasant-faced old man with a very long white beard used to sit. If you asked anybody who it was, the invariable reply was: "Oh! that's old Captain-; used to be in the New Orleans trade;--had to give up the river on account of rheumatism;--comes down every day to look at things."

Wonder whether the old captain still sits there of bright afternoons, to watch the returning steamers panting with their mighty run from the Far South--or whether he has sailed away upon that other river, silent and colorless as winter's fog, to that vast and shadowy port where much ghostly freight is discharged from vessels that never return? He haunts us sometimes--even as he must have been haunted by the ghosts of dead years.

When some great white boat came in, uttering its long, wild cry of joy after its giant race of eighteen hundred miles, to be reëchoed by the hundred voices of the rolling hills--surely the old man must have dreamed upon his folding stool of marvelous nights upon the Mississippi--nights filled with the perfume of orange blossoms under a milky palpitation of stars in amethystine sky, and witchery of tropical moonlight.

The romance of river-life is not like the romance of the sea--that romance memory evokes for us in the midst of the city by the simple exhalations of an asphalt pavement under the sun--divine saltiness, celestial freshness, the wild joy of wind-kissed waves, the hum of rigging and crackling of cordage, the rocking as of a mighty cradle. But it is perhaps sweeter. There is no perceptible motion of the river vessel; it is like the movement of a balloon, so steady that not we but the world only seems to move. Under the stars there seems to unroll its endlessness like an immeasurable ribbon of silver-purple. There is a noiseless ripple in it, as of watered silk. There is a heavy, sweet smell of nature, of luxuriant verdure; the feminine outlines of the hills, dotted with the chrome-yellow of window-lights, are blue-black; the vast arch of stars blossoms overhead; there is no sound but the colossal breathing of the laboring engines; the stream widens; the banks lessen; the heavens seem to grow deeper, the stars whiter, the blue bluer. Under the night it is all a blue world, as in a planet illuminated by a colored sun. The calls of the passing boats, sonorous as the music of vast silver trumpets, ring out clear but echoless;--there are no hills to give ghostly answer. Days are born in gold and die in rose-color; and the stream widens, widens, broadens toward the eternity of the sea under the eternity of the sky. We sail out of Northern frosts into Southern lukewarmness, into the luxuriant and somnolent smell of magnolias and lemon-blossoms--the sugar-country exhales its incense of welcome. And the giant crescent of lights, the stream-song of joyous boats, the world of chimneys, the forests of spars, the burst of morning glory over New Orleans viewed from the deck of a pilot-house....

These may never be wholly forgotten; after the lapse of fifty years in some dusty and dreary inland city, an odor, an echo, a printed name may resurrect their recollection, fresh as one of those Gulf winds that leave sweet odors after them, like coquettish women, like Talmudic angels.

So that we beheld all these things yesterday and heard all these dead voices once more; saw the old Western port with its water-be-slimed warehouses, and the Kentucky hills beyond the river, and the old captain on his folding stool, gazing wistfully at the boats; so that we heard once more the steam whistles of vessels that have long ceased to be, or that, changed into floating wharves, rise and fall with the flood, like corpses.

And all because there came an illustrious visitor to us, who reminded us of all these things; having once himself turned the pilot's wheel, through weird star-light or magical moonshine, gray rain or ghostly fog, golden sun or purple light--down the great river from Northern frosts to tepid Southern winds--and up the mighty stream into the misty North again.

To-day his name is a household word in the English-speaking world; his thoughts have been translated into other tongues; his written wit creates mirth at once in Paris salons and in New Zealand homes. Fortune has also extended to him her stairway of gold; and he has hobnobbed much with the great ones of the world. But there is still something of the pilot's cheery manner in his greeting, and the keenness of the pilot's glance in his eyes, and a looking out and afar off, as of the man who of old was wont to peer into the darkness of starless nights, with the care of a hundred lives on his hands.

He has seen many strange cities since that day--sailed upon many seas--studied many peoples--written many wonderful books.

Yet, now that he is in New Orleans again, one cannot help wondering whether his heart does not sometimes prompt him to go to the river, like that old captain of the far Northwestern port, to watch the white boats panting at the wharves, and listen to their cries of welcome or farewell, and dream of nights beautiful, silver-blue, and silent--and the great Southern moon peering into a pilot-house.

"HIS HEART IS OLD"[32]

Chrystoblepharos--Elikoblepharos--eyelids grace-kissed--the eyes of Leucothea--the dreaming marble head of the Capitoline Museum--the face of the girl-nurse of the wine-god, with a spray of wine-leaves filleting her sweet hair--that inexpressible, inexplicable, petrified dream of loveliness, which well enables us to comprehend old monkish tales regarding the infernal powers of enchantment possessed by the antique statues of those gods who Tertullian affirmed were demons. For in howsoever thoughtless a mood one may be when he first visits the archæological shrine in which the holiness of antique beauty reposes, the first glorious view of such a marble miracle compels the heart to slacken its motion in the awful wonder of that moment. One breathes low, as in sacred fear lest the vision might dissolve into nothingness--as though the witchery might be broken were living breath to touch with its warm moisture that wonderful marble cheek. Vainly may you strive to solve the secret of this magical art; the exquisite mystery is divine--human eye may never pierce it; one dare not laugh, dare not speak in its presence--that beauty imposes silence by its very sweetness; one may pray voicelessly, one does not smile in presence of the Superhuman. And when hours of mute marveling have passed, the wonder seems even newer than before. Shall we wonder that early Christian zealots should have dashed these miracles to pieces, maddened by the silent glamour of beauty that defied analysis and seemed, indeed, a creation of the Master-Magician himself?

And the Centauress, in cameo, kneeling to suckle her little one;--the supple nudity of exquisite ephebi turning in eternal dance about the circumference of wondrous vases;--gentle Psyche, butterfly-winged, weeping on a graven carnelian;--river-deities in relief eternally watching the noiseless flow of marble waves from urns that gurgle not;--joyous Tritons with knotty backs and seaweed twined among their locks;--luxurious symposia in sculpture, such as might have well suggested the Oriental fancy of petrified cities, with their innumerable pleasure-seekers suddenly turned to stone;--splendid processions of maidens to the shrine of the Maiden-Goddess, and Bacchantes leading tame panthers in the escort of the Rosy God: all these and countless other visions of the dead Greek world still haunted me, as I laid aside the beautiful and quaint volume of archæological learning that inspired them--bound in old fashion, and bearing the imprint of a firm that had ceased to exist ere the close of the French Revolution--a Rococo Winkelmann. And still they circled about me, with the last smoke-wreaths of the last evening pipe, on the moonlight balcony, among the shadows.

Then as I dreamed the beautiful dead world seemed to live again, in a luminous haze, in an Elysian glow. The processions of stone awoke from their sleep of two thousand years, and moved and chanted;--marble dreams became lithe flesh;--the phantom Arcadia was peopled with shapes of unclad beauty;--I saw eyelids as of Leucothea palpitating under the kisses of the Charities--the incarnate loveliness superhuman of a thousand god-like beings, known to us only by their shadows in stone;--and the efflorescent youth of that vanished nation, whose idols were Beauty and Joy--who laughed much and never wept--whose perfect faces were never clouded by the shadow of a grief, nor furrowed by the agony of thought, nor wrinkled by the bitterness of tears.

I found myself in the honeyed heart of that world, where all was youth and joy--where the very air seemed to thrill with new happiness in a paradise newly created--where innumerable flowers, of genera unknown in these later years, filled the valley with amorous odor of spring. But I sat among them with the thoughts of the Nineteenth Century, and the heart of the Nineteenth Century, and the garb of the Nineteenth Century, which is black as a garb of mourning for the dead. And they drew about me, seeing that I laughed not at all, nor smiled, nor spoke; and low-whispering to one another, they murmured with a silky murmur as of summer winds:

"His heart is old!"

And I pondered the words of the Ecclesiast: "Sorrow is better than laughter; for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.... It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting; and the day of one's death is better than the day of one's birth." But I answered nothing; and they spake again, whispering, _"His heart is old!_" And one with sweet and silky-lidded eyes, lifted her voice and spake:

"O thou dreamer, wherefore evoke us, wherefore mourn us--seeing that there is no more joy in the world?

"Ours was a world of light and of laughter and of flowers, of loveliness and of love. Thine is smoke-darkened and sombre; there is no beauty unveiled; and men have forgotten how to laugh.

"Ye have increased wisdom unto sorrow, and sorrow unto infinite despair;--for there is now no Elysium--the vault of heaven has sunk back into immensity, and dissolved itself into nothingness; the boundaries of earth are set, and the earth itself resolved into a grain of dust, whirling in the vast white ring of innumerable suns and countless revolving worlds. Yet we were happier, believing the blossoming of stars to be only drops of milk from the perfect breast of a goddess.

"Nymphs haunted our springs; dryads slumbered in the waving shadows of our trees; zephyrs ethereal rode upon our summer winds; and great Pan played upon his pipe in the emerald gloom of our summer woods. Ye men of to-day have analyzed all substances, decomposed all elements, to discover the Undiscoverable, and ye have found it not. But in searching for the unsearchable, ye have lost joy.

"We loved the beauty of youth--the litheness of young limbs--the rosy dawn of maturity--the bloom of downy cheeks--the sweetness of eyes sweetened by vague desires of life's spring--the marvelous thrill of a first kiss--the hunger of love which had only to announce itself to be appeased--and the glory of strength. But ye have sought the secret of the Universal life in charnel-houses--dismembering rottenness itself and prying open the jaws of Death to view the awful emptiness therein. Learning only enough to appall you, ye have found that science can teach you less of beauty than our forgotten gymnasiums; but in the mean time, ye have forgotten how to love.

"We gave to the bodies of our well-beloved the holy purification of fire; ye confide them to the flesh-eating earth, filling your cities with skeletons. For us Death was bodiless and terrible; for you she is visible and yet welcome;--for so weary have men become of life that her blackness seems to them beauty,--the beauty of a mistress, the universal Pasiphila, who alone can give consolation to hearts weary of life. So that ye have even forgotten how to die!

"And thou, O dreamer, thou knowest that there was no beginning and that there shall be no end; but thou dost also know that the dust beneath thy feet has lived and loved, that all which now lives once lived not, and that what is now lifeless will live again;--thou knowest that the substance of the sweetest lips has passed through myriad million transformations, that the light of the sweetest eyes will still pass through innumerable changes after the fires of the stars have burnt themselves out. In seeking the All-Soul, thou hast found it in thyself, and hast elevated thyself to deity, yet for thee are vows vain and oracles dumb. Hope is extinguished in everlasting night; thou mayst not claim even the consolation of prayer, for thou canst not pray to thyself. Like the Mephistopheles of thy poet, O dreamer of the Nineteenth Century, thou mayst sit between the Sphinx of the Past and the Sphinx of the Future, and question them, and open their lips of granite, and answer their mocking riddles. But thou mayst not forget how to weep, even though thy heart grow old."...

But I could not weep!--And the phantoms, marveling, murmured with a strange murmur--"The heart of Medusa!"

MDCCCLIII[33]

Somebody I knew was there--a woman....

Heat, motionless and ponderous, as in some feverish colonial city rising from the venomous swamps of the Ivory Coast. The sky-blue seemed to bleach from the horizon's furnace edges--even sounds were muffled and blunted by the heaviness of that air--vaguely, as to a dozing brain, came the passing reverberation of footsteps;--the river-current was noiseless and thick and lazy, like wax-made fluid.... Such were the days--and each day offered up a triple hecatomb to death--and the faces of all the dead were yellow as flame....

Never a drop of rain:--the thin clouds which made themselves visible of evenings only, flocking about the dying fires of the west, seemed to dwellers in the city troops of ghosts departing with the day, as in the fantastic myths of the South Pacific.

...I passed the outer iron gate--the warm seashells strewing the way broke under my feet with faint saline odors in the hot air:--I heard the iron tongue of a bell utter ONE, with the sinister vibration of a knell--signaling the eternal extinction of a life. Seven and seventy times that iron tongue had uttered its grim monosyllable since the last setting of the sun. The grizzled watcher of the inner gate extended his pallid palm for that eleemosynary contribution exacted from all visitors;--and it seemed to me that I beheld the gray Ferryman of Shadows himself, silently awaiting his obolus from me, also a Shadow. And as I glided into the world of agony beyond, the dead-bell moved its iron tongue again--once....

Vast bare gleaming corridors into which many doors exhaled odors of medicines and moans and sound of light footsteps hurrying--then I stood a moment all alone--a long moment that I repass sometimes in dreams. (Only that in dreams of the past there are no sounds--the dead are dumb; and the fondest may not retain the evanescent memory of a voice.) Then suddenly approached a swift step--so light, so light that it seemed the coming of a ghost; and I saw a slight figure black-robed from neck to feet, the fantastically winged cap of a Sister, and beneath the white cap a dark and beautiful face with very black eyes. Even then the iron bell spake again--once! I muttered--nay, I whispered, all fearful with the fearfulness of that place, the name of a ward and--the name of a Woman.

"Friend, friend! what do you want here?" murmured the Sister, who saw that the visitor was a stranger. Hers was the first voice I had heard in that place of death, and it seemed so sweet and clear--a musical vibration of youth and hope! And I answered, this time audibly. "You are not afraid?" she asked. "Come!"

Taking my hand, she led me thither--through spaces of sunlight and shadow, through broad and narrow ways, and between rows of beds white like rows of tombs. Her hand was cool and light as mist--as frost--as the guiding touch of that spirit might be whom the faithful of many creeds believe to lead their dead out of the darkness, into some vast new dawning beyond.... "You are not afraid?--not afraid?" the sweet voice asked again. And I suddenly became aware of the dead, lying between us, and the death-color in her face, like a flare of sunset....

Then for an instant everything became dark between me and the Sister standing upon the other side of the dead--and I was groping in that darkness blindly, until I felt a cool hand grasp mine, leading me silently somewhere--somewhere into the light. "Come! you have no claim here, friend! you cannot take her back from God!--let us leave her with Him!" And I obeyed all voicelessly. I felt her light, cool hand leading me again between the long ranks of white beds, and through the vast, bare corridors, and the shining lobbies, and by the doors of a hundred chambers of death.

Then at the summit of the great stairway, she turned her rich gaze into my eyes with a strange, sweet, silent sympathy, pressed my hand an instant, and was gone. I heard the whisper of her departing robe; I saw the noiseless fluttering of her white cap;--a great door opened very silently, closed inaudibly; and I was all alone.--(Some one told me, only a few days later, that the iron bell had also spoken for her, the little Sister of Charity--in the middle of the night--once!)

And I, standing alone upon the stairs, felt something unutterably strange within me--the influence of that last look, perhaps still vibrating, like an expiring sunbeam, a dying tone. Something in her eyes had rekindled into life something long burned out within my heart--the ashes of a Faith entombed as in a sepulchral urn.... Yet only a moment; and the phantom flame sank back into its ashes; and I was in the sunlight again, iron of purpose as Pharaoh after the death of his first-born. It was only a dead emotion, warmed to resurrection by the sunshine of a woman's eyes.

...Nevertheless, I fancy that when the Ringer is preparing to ring for me--and the great darkness deepens all about me--when sounds sink to their whispers and questions must remain eternally unanswered--when memory is fading out into the infinite blackness, and those strange dreams that precurse the final dissolution marshal their illusions before me--I fancy that I might hear again the whisper of a black robe, and feel a hand, light as frost, held out to me with the sweet questioning--"_Come! You are not afraid?_"

HIOUEN-THSANG[34]

The story of him who gave the Lotus of the good Law unto
four hundred millions of his people in the Middle Kingdom,
and remained insensible unto honors even as the rose-leaf to
the dewdrop....

Twelve hundred years ago, in a town of China, situated in the inmost recesses of the kingdom called Celestial, was born a boy, at whose advent in this world of illusions the spirits of good rejoiced, and marvelous things also happened--according to the legends of those years. For before his birth, the mother dreaming beheld the Shadow of Buddha above her, radiant as the face of the Mountain of Light; and after the Shadow had passed, she was aware of the figure of her son, that was to be, following after It over vast distances to cities of an architecture unknown, and through forests of strange growth that seemed not of this world. And a Voice gave her to know that her boy would yet travel in search of the Word through unknown lands, and be guided by Lord Buddha in his wanderings, and find in the end that which he sought....

So the boy grew up in wisdom; and his face became as the white face of the God in the Temple beyond Tientsin, where the mirage shifts its spectral beauties forever above the sands, typifying to the faithful that the world and all within it are but a phantasmagoria of illusion. And the boy was instructed by the priests of Buddha, and became wiser than they.

For the Law of Buddha had blossomed in the land unnumbered years, and the Son of Heaven had bowed down before it, and there were in the Empire many thousand convents of holy monks, and countless teachers of truth. But in the lapse of a thousand years and more the Lotus Flower of the Good Law had lost its perfume; much of the wisdom of the World-honored had been forgotten; fire and the fury of persecution had made small the number of holy books. When Hiouen-thsang sought for the deeper wisdom of the Law he found it not; nor was there in all China one who could inform him. Then a great longing came upon him to go to India, the land of the Savior of Man, and there seek the wondrous words that had been lost, and the marvelous books unread by Chinese eyes.

Before the time of Hiouen-thsang other Chinese pilgrims had visited the Indian Palestine;--Fabian had been sent thither upon a pilgrimage by a holy Empress. But these others had received aid of money and of servants--letters to governors and gifts to kings. Hiouen-thsang had neither money nor servants, nor any knowledge of the way. Therefore he could only seek aid from the Emperor, and permission. But the Son of Heaven rejected the petition written upon yellow silk, and signed with two thousand devout names. Moreover, he forbade Hiouen-thsang to leave the kingdom under penalty of death.