FANTASTICS AND OTHER FANCIES (continued 3)

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.

But the heart of Hiouen-thsang told him that he must go. And he remembered that the caravans from India used to bring their strange wares to a city on the Hoang-ho—on the Yellow River. Secretly departing in the night, he traveled for many days, succored upon his way by the brethren, until he came to the caravansary, and saw the Indian merchants with their multitude of horses and of camels, resting beside the Hoang-ho.

And presently when they departed for the frontier, he followed secretly after them, with two Buddhist friends.

So they came to the frontier, where the line of the fortifications stretched away lessening into the desert, with their watch-towers fantastically capped, like Mandarins. But here only the caravan could pass; for the guards had orders from the Son of Heaven to seize upon Hiouen-thsang;—and the Indian merchants rode away far beyond the line of the watch-towers; and the caravan became only a moving speck against the disk of the sun, to disappear with his setting. Yet in the night Hiouen-thsang passed with his friends, like shadows, through the line of guards, and followed the trail.

Happily the captain in charge of the next watch-tower was a holy man, and moved by the supplications of the Buddhist priests, he permitted Hiouen-thsang to pass on. But the other brethren trembled and returned, leaving Hiouen-thsang alone. Yet India was still more than a thousand miles distant, by the way of the caravans.

Only the men of the last watch-tower would not allow Hiouen-thsang to pass; but he escaped by them into the desert. Then he followed the line of the caravan, the prints of the feet of camels and horses leading toward India. Skeletons were whitening in the sands; the eyeless sockets of innumerable skulls looked at him. The sun set and rose again many times; the sand-sea moved its waves continually with a rustling sound; the multitude of white bones waxed vaster. And as Hiouen-thsang proceeded phantom cities mocked him on the right hand and upon the left, and the spectral caravans wrought by the mirage rode by him shadowlessly. Then his water-skin burst, and the desert drank up its contents; the hoof-prints disappeared. Hiouen-thsang had lost his way....

From the past of twelve hundred years ago, we can hear the breaking of that water-skin;—we can feel the voiceless despair that for a moment chilled the heart and faith of Hiouen-thsang—alone in the desert of skeletons—alone in the infinite platitude of sand broken only by the mockeries of the mirage. But the might of faith helped him on; prayers were his food, Buddha the star-compass that illuminated the path to India. For five days and five nights he traveled without meat or drink under blistering suns, under the vast throbbing of stars—and at last the sharp yellow line of the horizon became green!

It was not the mirage—it was a land of steel-bright lakes and long grass—the land of the men who live upon horseback—the country of the Oigour Tartars.

The Khan received the pilgrim as a son; honors were showered upon him—for the fame of Hiouen-thsang as a teacher of the Law had reached into the heart of Asia. And they desired that he should remain with them, to instruct them in the knowledge of Buddha. When he would not—only after having vainly essayed upon him such temptation and coercion by turns that he was driven to despair, the Khan at last permitted him to depart under oath that he would return. But India was still far away. Hiouen-thsang had to pass through the territories of twenty-four great kings ere reaching the Himalayas. The Khan gave him an escort and letters to the rulers of all kingdoms, for his memory is yet blessed in the Empire Celestial.

It was in the seventh century. Rivers have changed their courses since then. Hiouen-thsang visited the rulers of kingdoms that have utterly disappeared; he beheld civilizations where are now wastes of sand; he conversed with masters of a learning that has vanished without leaving a trace behind. The face of the world is changed; but the words of Hiouen-thsang change not;—lakes have dried up, yet we even now in this Western republic drink betimes from that Fountain of Gold which Hiouen-thsang set flowing—to flow forever!

So they beheld at last, afar off, the awful Himalayas, whose white turbans touch the heaven of India, vested with thunder-clouds, belted with lightnings! And Hiouen-thsang passed through gorges overhung by the drooping fangs of monsters of ice—through ravines so dark that the traveler beholds the stars above him at noonday, and eagles like dots against the sky—and hard by the icy cavern whence the sacred river leaps in roaring birth—and by winding ways to valleys eternally green—and ever thus into the glowing paradise of Hindustan. But of those that followed Hiouen-thsang, thirteen were buried in the eternal snow.

He saw the wondrous cities of India; he saw the sanctuaries of Benares; saw the great temples since destroyed for modern eyes by Moslem conquerors; saw the idols that had diamond eyes and bellies filled with food of emeralds and carbuncles; he trod where Buddha had walked; he came to Maghada, which is the Holy Land of India. Alone and on foot he traversed the jungles; the cobra hissed under his feet, the tiger glared at him with eyes that flamed like emeralds, the wild elephant's mountain-shadow fell across his path. Yet he feared nothing, for he sought Buddha. The Phansigars flung about his neck the noose of the strangler, and yet loosened him on beholding the holiness of his face; swarthy robbers, whose mustaches were curved like scimitars, lifted their blades to smite, and beholding his eyes turned away. So he came to the Dragon-Cavern of Purushapura to seek Buddha. For Buddha, though having entered Nirvana a thousand years, sometimes there made himself visible as a luminous Shadow to those who loved him.

But in the cavern was a darkness as of the grave, a silence as of death; Hiouen-thsang prayed in vain, and vainly wept for many hours in the darkness. At last there came a faint glow upon the wall, like a beam of the moon—and passed away. Then Hiouen-thsang prayed yet more fervently than before; and again in the darkness came a light—but a fierce brightness as of lightning, as quickly passing away. Yet a third time Hiouen-thsang wept and prayed; and a white glory filled all the black cavern—and brighter than the sun against that glory appeared the figure and face of Buddha, holier of beauty than all conceptions of man. So that Hiouen-thsang worshiped with his face to the earth. And Buddha smiled upon him, making the heart of the pilgrim full of sunshine—but the Divine spoke not, inasmuch as he had entered into Nirvana a thousand years.

After this Hiouen-thsang passed sixteen years in the holy places, copying the Law, and seeking the words of Buddha in books that had been written in languages no longer spoken. Of these he obtained one thousand three hundred and thirty-five volumes. Other volumes there were in the Island of Elephants far to the South—in sultry Ceylon; but thither it was not permitted him to go.

He was a youth when he fled from China into the desert; he was a gray man when he returned. The Emperor that had forbade his going now welcomed his return, with processions of tremendous splendor, in which were borne the Golden Dragon and numberless statues in gold. But Hiouen-thsang withdrew from all honors into a monastery in the mountains, desiring to spend the rest of his life only in translating the word of Buddha contained in those many hundred books which he had found. And of these before his death he translated seven hundred and forty into one thousand three hundred and thirty-five volumes, as the books of the Chinese are made. Having completed his task, he passed away in the midst of great sorrow;—the Empire wept for him—four hundred millions mourned for him.

Did he see the Shadow of Buddha smile upon him before he passed away, as he saw it in the Dragon-Cavern at Purushapura?... It is said that five others with him also beheld that luminous presence in the cave. Yet we may well believe that he only saw it—faith-created; for Buddha having passed into Nirvana may be sought only in the hearts of men, and seen only by the eyes of faith!

Twelve hundred years ago Hiouen-thsang devoted his life to the pursuit of that he believed to be Truth—abandoned all things for what he held to be Duty—encountered such hardships as perhaps no other man ever encountered in the search for Wisdom. To-day nations that were unborn in his years are reaping the fruits of his grand sacrifice of self. His travels have been recently translated into the French tongue; his own translations are aiding the philologists of the nineteenth century to solve historical and ethnical problems; Max Müller lectures[35] upon his wonderful mission to India in the seventh century; and stories from the books he brought back from Maghada are in the hands of American readers. Who shall say that there is no goodness without the circle of Christianity!—who declare that heroism and unselfishness, and truth, and purest faith may not exist save within the small sphere of what we fancy the highest ethical civilization! The pilgrims to the Indian Palestine, the martyrs of the Indian Christ, are surely the brethren of all whom we honor in the history of self-abnegation and the good fight for truth.

L'AMOUR APRÈS LA MORT[36]

No rest he knew because of her. Even in the night his heart was ever startled from slumber as by the echo of her footfall; and dreams mocked him with tepid fancies of her lips; and when he sought forgetfulness in strange kisses her memory ever came shadowing between.... So that, weary of his life, he yielded it up at last in the fevered summer of a tropical city,—dying with her name upon his lips. And his face was no more seen in the palm-shadowed streets;—but the sun rose and sank even as before.

And that vague Something which lingers a little while within the tomb where the body moulders, lingered and dreamed within the long dark resting-place where they had laid him with the pious hope—Que en paz descanse!

Yet so weary of his life had the Wanderer been that the repose of the dead was not for him. And while the body shrank and sank into dust, the phantom man found no rest in the darkness, and thought dimly to himself: "I am even too weary to find peace!"

There was a thin crevice in the ancient wall of the tomb. And through it, and through the meshes of a web that a spider had woven athwart it, the dead looked and beheld the amethystine blaze of the summer sky—and pliant palms bending in the warm wind—and the opaline glow of the horizon, and fair pools bearing images of cypresses inverted—and the birds that flitted from tomb to tomb and sang—and flowers in the shadow of the sepulchres ...And the vast bright world seemed to him not so hateful as before.

Likewise the sounds of life assailed the faint senses of the dead through the thin crevice in the wall of the tomb:—always the far-off, drowsy murmur made by the toiling of the city's heart; sometimes sounds of passing converse and of steps—echoes of music and of laughter—chanting and chattering of children at play—and the liquid babble of beautiful brown women.

...So that the dead man dreamed of life and strength and joy, and the litheness of limbs to be loved: also of that which had been, and of that which might have been, and of that which now could never be. And he longed at last to live again—seeing that there was no rest in the tomb.

But the gold-born days died in golden fire; and blue nights unnumbered filled the land with indigo-shadows; and the perfume of the summer passed like a breath of incense—and the dead within the sepulchre could not wholly die.

Stars in their courses peered down through the crevices of the tomb, and twinkled, and passed on; winds of the sea shrieked to him through the widening crannies of the tomb; birds sang above him and flew to other lands; the bright lizards that ran noiselessly over his bed of stone, as noiselessly departed; the spider at last ceased to repair her web of elfin silk; years came and went with lentor inexpressible; but for the dead there was no rest!

And after many tropical moons had waxed and waned, and the summer was deepening in the land, filling the golden air with tender drowsiness and passional perfume, it strangely came to pass that She, whose name had been murmured by his lips when the Shadow of Death fell upon him, came to that city of palms, and even unto the ancient place of sepulture, and unto the tomb that was nameless.

And he knew the whisper of her raiment—knew the sweetness of her presence—and the pallid hearts of the blossoms of a plant whose blind roots had found food within the crevice of the tomb, changed and flushed, and flamed incarnadine....

But She—perceiving it not—passed by; and the sound of her footstep died away forever.

THE POST-OFFICE[37]

I

The little steamer will bear you thither in one summer day—starting at early morning, arriving just as the sun begins to rest his red chin upon the edge of the west. It is a somewhat wearisome and a wonderfully tortuous journey, through that same marshy labyrinth by which the slavers in other days used to smuggle their African freight up to the old Creole city from the Gulf.... Leaving the Mississippi by a lock-guarded opening in its western levee, the miniature packet first enters a long and narrow canal—cutting straight across plantations considerably below the level of its raised banks—and through this artificial waterway she struggles on, panting desperately under the scorching heat, until after long hours she almost leaps, with a great steam-sigh of relief, into the deeper and broader bayou that serpentines through the swamp-forest. Then there is at least ample shadow; the moss-hung trees fling their silhouettes right across the water and into the woods on the other side, morning and evening. Grotesque roots—black, geniculated, gnarly—project from the crumbling banks like bones from an ancient grave;—dead, shrunken limbs and fallen trunks lie macerating in the slime. Grim shapes of cypress stoop above us, and seem to point the way with anchylosed knobby finger—their squalid tatters of moss grazing our smoke-stack. The banks swarm with crustaceans, gnawing, burrowing, undermining; gray saurians slumber among the gray floating logs at the edge; gorged carrion-birds doze upon the paralytic shoulders of cypresses, about whose roots are coiled more serpents than ever gnawed Yggdrasil. The silence is only broken by the loud breathing of the little steamer;—odors of vegetable death—smells of drowned grasses and decomposing trunks and of eternal mould-formation—make the air weighty to breathe; and the green obscurities on either hand deepen behind the crests of the water-oaks and the bright masses of willow frondescense. The parasitic life of the swamp, pendent and enormous, gives the scene a drenched, half-drowned look, as of a land long-immersed, and pushed up again from profundities of stagnant water—and still dripping with moisture and monstrous algæ....

The ranks of the water-oaks become less serried—the semi-tropical vegetation less puissant—the willows and palmettoes and cypresses no longer bar out the horizon-light; and the bayou broadens into a shining, green-rimmed sheet of water, over which our little boat puffs a zigzag course—feeling her way cautiously—to enter a long chain of lakelets and lakes, all bayou-linked together. Sparser and lower becomes the foliage-line, lower also the banks; the water-tints brighten bluely; the heavy and almost acrid odors of the swamp pass away. So thin the land is that from the little steamer's deck, as from a great altitude, the eye can range over immense distances. These are the skirts of the continent, trending in multitudinous tatters southward to the sea;—and the practiced gaze of the geologist can discern the history of prodigious alluvial formation, the slow creation of future prairie lands, in those long grassy tongues—those desolate islands, shaped like the letters of an Oriental alphabet—those reaches of flesh-colored sand, that shift their shape with the years, but never cease to grow.

Miles of sluggish, laboring travel—sometimes over shallows of less than half a fathom—through archipelagoes whose islets become more and more widely separated as we proceed. Then the water deepens steadily—and the sky also seems to deepen—and there is something in the bright air that makes electrical commotion in the blood and fills the lungs with richer life. Gulls with white breasts and dark, broad wings sweep past with sharp, plaintive cries; brown clouds of pelicans hover above tiny islands within rifle-shot—alternately rising and descending all together. Through luminous distances the eye can just distinguish masses of foliage, madder-colored by remoteness, that seem to float in suspension between the brightness of the horizon and the brightness of water, like shapes of the Fata Morgana. And in those far, dim, island groves prevails, perhaps, the strange belief that the Universe itself is but a mirage; for the gods of the most eastern East have been transported thither, and the incense of Oriental prayer mounts thence into the azure of a Christian heaven. Those are Chinese fishing-stations—miniature villages of palmetto huts, whose yellow populations still cling to the creed of Fo—unless, indeed, they follow the more practical teachings of the Ancient Infant, born with snow-white hair—the doctrine of the good Thai-chang-lao-kinn, the sublime Loo-tseu...

II

Glassy-smooth the water sleeps along the northern coast of our island summer resort, as the boat slowly skirts the low beach, passing bright shallows where seines of stupendous extent are hung upon rows of high stakes to dry;—but already the ear is filled with a ponderous and powerful sound, rolling up from the south through groves of orange and lemon—the sound of that "great voice that shakes the world." For less than half a mile away—across the narrow island—immense surges are whitening all the long slant of sand.... Divinely caressing the first far-off tones of that eternal voice to one revisiting ocean after absence of many weary and dusty summers—tones filling the mind with even such vague blending of tenderness and of awe as the pious traveler might feel when, returning after long sojourn in a land of strange, grim gods, whose temple pavements may never be trodden by Occidental feet, he hears again the pacific harmonies of some cathedral organ, breaking all about him in waves of golden thunder.

...Then with a joyous shock we bump the ancient wooden wharf—where groups of the brown island people are already waiting to scrutinize each new face with kindliest curiosity; for the advent of the mail-packet is ever a great and gladsome event. Even the dogs bark merry welcome, and run to be caressed. A tramway car receives the visitors—baggage is piled on—the driver clacks his tongue—the mule starts—the dogs rush on in advance to announce our coming.

III

In the autumn of the old feudal years, all this sea-girdled land was one quivering splendor of sugar-cane, walled in from besieging tides with impregnable miles of levee. But when the great decadence came, the rude sea gathered up its barbarian might, and beat down the strong dikes, and made waste the opulent soil, and, in Abimelech-fury, sowed the site of its conquests with salt. Some of the old buildings are left;—the sugar-house has been converted into an ample dining-hall; the former slave-quarters have been remodeled and fitted up for guests—a charming village of white cottages, shadowed by aged trees; the sugar-pans have been turned into water-vessels for the live-stock; and the old plantation-bell, of honest metal and pure tone, now summons the visitor to each repast.

And all this little world, though sown with sand and salt, teems with extraordinary exuberance of life. Night and day the foliage of the long groves vibrates to chant of insect and feathered songster; and beyond reckoning are the varieties of nest-builders—among whom very often may be perceived rose-colored or flame-colored strangers of the tropics—flown hither over the Caribbean Sea. The waters are choked with fish; the horizon ever darkened with flights of birds; the very soil seems to stir, to creep, to breathe. Every little bank, ditch, creek, swarms with "fiddlers," each holding high its single huge white claw in readiness for battle; and the dryer lands are haunted by myriads of ghostly crustacea—phantom crabs—semi-diaphanous creatures that flit over the land with the speed and lightness of tarantulas, and are so pale of shell that their moving shadows first betray their presence. There are immense choruses of tree-frogs by day, bamboulas of water-frogs after sundown. The vast vitality of the ocean seems to interpenetrate all that sprouts, breathes, flies. Cattle fatten wonderfully upon the tough wire-grass; sheep multiply exceedingly. In every chink something is trying to grow, in every orifice some tiny life seeks to hide itself (even beneath the edge of the table on which I wrote some queer little creatures had built three marvelous nests of dry mud);—every substance here appears not only to maintain life but to create it; and ideas of spontaneous generation present themselves with irresistible force.

IV

...And children in multitude!—children of many races, and of many tints—ranging from ivorine to glossy bronze, through half the shades of Broca's pattern-colors;—for there is a strange blending of tribes and peoples here. By and by, when the youths and maidens of these patriarchal families shall mate, they will build for themselves funny little timber-homes—like those you see dotting the furzy-green plain about the log-dwelling of the oldest settler—even as so many dove-cots. Existence here is so facile, happy, primitively simple, that trifles give joy unspeakable;—in that bright air whose purity defies the test of even the terrible solar microscope, neither misery nor malady may live. To such contented minds surely the Past must ever appear in a sunset-glow of gold; the Future in eternal dawn of rose;—until, perchance, the huge dim city summon some of them to her dusty servitude, when the gray elders shall have passed away, and the little patches of yellow-flowered meadow-land shall have changed hands, and the island hath no more place for all its children.... So they live and love, and marry and give in marriage, and build their little dove-cots, and pass away forever—either to smoky cities of the South and West, or, indeed, to that vaster and more ancient city, whose streets are shadowless and voiceless, and whose gates are guarded by God.

But the mighty blind sea will ever chant the same mysterious hymn, under the same infinite light of blue, for those who shall come after them....

V

...No electric nerves have yet penetrated this little world, to connect its humble life with the industrial and commercial activities of the continent: here the feverish speculator feels no security:—it is a fit sojourn for those only who wish to forget the harsh realities of city existence, the burning excitement of loss and gain, the stern anxieties of duty—who care only to enjoy the rejuvenating sea, to drink the elixir of the perfect air, to dream away the long and luminous hours, perfumed with sweet, faint odors of summer. The little mail-boat, indeed, comes at regular intervals of days, and the majesty of the United States is represented by a post-office—but the existence of that office could never be divined by the naked eye.

A negro, who seemed to understand Spanish only, responded to my inquiries by removing a pipe from his lips, and pointing the cane-stem thereof toward a building that made a dark red stain against the green distance—with the words: "Casa de correo?—si, señor! directamente detras del campo, señor;—sigue el camino carretero à la casa colorada."

So I crossed plains thickly grown with a sturdy green weed bearing small yellow flowers, and traversed plank-bridges laid over creeks in which I saw cats fishing and swimming—actually swimming, for even the feline race loses its dread of water here;—and I followed a curving roadway half obliterated by wire-grass—until I found myself at last within a small farmyard, where cords of wood were piled up about an antique, gabled, chocolate-colored building that stood in the midst. I walked half around it, seeking for the entrance—hearing only the sound of children's voices, and a baby's laughter; and finally came in front of an open gallery on the southern side, where a group of Creole children were—two pretty blond infants, with an elder and darker sister. Seated in a rocking-chair, her infant brother sprawling at her feet, she was dancing a baby sister on her knee, chanting the while this extraordinary refrain:

"Zanimaux caquéne so manié galoupé;—bourique—tiquiti, tiquiti, tiquiti; milet—tocoto, tocoto, tocoto; çouval—tacata, tacata, tacata."

And with the regular crescendo of the three onomatopes, the baby went higher and higher.... My steps had made no sound upon the soft grass; the singer's back, inundated with chestnut hair, was turned toward me; but the baby had observed my approach, and its blue stare of wonder caused the girl to look round. At once she laid the child upon the floor, arose, and descended the wooden step to meet me with the question—"Want to see papa?"

She might perhaps have been twelve, not older—slight, with one of those sensitive, oval faces that reveal a Latin origin, and the pinkness of rich health bursting through its olive skin;—the eyes that questioned my face were brown and beautiful as a wild deer's.

"I want to get some stamped envelopes," I responded;—"is this the post-office?"

"Yes, sir; I can give them to you," she answered, turning back toward the gallery steps;—"come this way!"

I followed her as far as the doorway of the tiniest room I had ever seen—just large enough to contain a safe, an office desk, and a chair. It was cozy, carpeted, and well lighted by a little window fronting the sea. I saw a portrait hanging above the desk—a singularly fine gray head, with prophetic features and Mosaic beard—the portrait of the island's patriarch....

"You see," she observed, in response to my amused gaze, while she carefully unlocked the safe—"when papa and mamma are at work in the field, I have to take charge. Papa tells me what to do.—How many did you say?—four!—that will be ten cents.—Now, if you have a letter to post, you can leave it here—if you like."

I handed her my letter—a thick one—in a two-cent envelope. She weighed it in her slender brown hand;—I suspected the postage was insufficient.

"It is too heavy," she said;—"you will have to put another stamp on it, I think."

"In that case," I replied, "take back one of the stamped envelopes, and give me instead a two-cent stamp for my letter."

She hesitated a moment, with a pretty look of seriousness—and then answered:

"Why, yes, I could do that; but—but that would n't be doing fair by you"—passing her fine thin fingers through the brown curls in a puzzled way;—"no, that would n't be fair to you."

"Of course it's fair," I averred encouragingly—"we can't bother with fractions, and I have no more small change. That is all right."

"No, it is n't all right," she returned—making the exchange with some reluctance;—"it isn't right to take more than the worth of our money; but I don't really know how to fix it. I'll ask papa when he comes home, and we'll send you the difference—if there is any.—Oh! yes, I will!—I'll send it to the hotel.—It would n't be right to keep it."

All vain my protests.

"No, no! I'm sure we owe you something. Valentine! Léonie!—say good-bye—nicely!"

So the golden-haired babies cooed their "goo'-bye," as I turned the corner, and waved them kisses;—and as I reached the wagon-road by the open gate, I heard again the bird-voice of the little post-mistress singing her onomatopoetic baby-song:

"Bourique—tiquiti, tiquiti, tiquiti; milet—tocoto, tocoto, tocoto; çouval—tacata, tacata, tacata."

VI

... O little brown-eyed lamb, the wolfish world waits hungrily to devour such as thou!—O dainty sea-land flower, that pinkness of thine will not fade out more speedily than shall evaporate thy perfume of sweet illusions in the stagnant air of cities! Many tears will dim those dark eyes, nevertheless, ere thou shalt learn that wealth—even the wealth of nations—is accumulated, without sense of altruism, in eternal violation of those exquisite ethics which seem to thee of God's own teaching. When thou shalt have learned this, and other and sadder things, perhaps, memory may crown thee with her crown of sorrows—may bear thee back, back, in wonderful haze of blue and gold, to that island home of thine—even into that tiny office-room, with its smiling gray portrait of thy dead father's father. And fancy may often re-create for thee the welcome sound of hoofs returning home: "çouval—tacata, tacata, tacata."...

And dreaming of the funny little refrain, the stranger fancied he could look into the future of many years.... And in the public car of a city railroad, he saw a brown-eyed, sweet-faced woman, whom it seemed he had known a child, but now with a child of her own—asleep there in her arms—and so pale! It was sundown; and her face was turned to the west, where lingered splendid mockeries of summer seas—golden Pacifics speckled with archipelagoes of rose and fairy-green. But he knew in some mysterious way that she was thinking of seas not of mist,—of islands not of cloud, while the heavy vehicle rumbled on its dusty way, and the hoofs of the mule seemed to beat time to an old Creole refrain—Milet—tocoto, tocoto, tocoto.