The return that spring of little Jeanne's father from a sea voyage interested me greatly. For several days her house was topsy-turvy with preparation, and one could guess the joy they felt over his approaching arrival. The frigate that he commanded reached port a little earlier than his family expected it, and from my window I saw him, one fine evening, hurrying along the street alone, on his way home to surprise his people. He had arrived from I know not which distant colony after an absence of two or three years, but it did not seem to me that he was the least altered in appearance. . . . One could then return to his home unchanged? They did come to an end after all, those years of exile, which now I find, in truth, much shorter than they seemed in those days! My brother himself was to return the following autumn, and it would doubtless then seem as if he had never been away from us.
And what joyous events those home-comings were! And what a distinction surrounded those who had but newly returned from so great a distance!
The next day in Jeanne's yard I watched them unpack the enormous wooden boxes that her father had brought from strange countries; some of them were covered with tarpaulin cloth,—pieces of sails no doubt, that were impregnated with the agreeable odor of the ship and the sea; two sailors wearing large blue collars were busy uncording and unscrewing them; and they took from them strange looking objects that had an odor of the “colonies;” straw mats, water jars and Chinese vases; even cocoanuts and other tropical fruits.
Jeanne's grandfather, himself an old seaman, was standing near me watching from the corner of his eye the process of unpacking; suddenly, from between the boards of a case that was being broken open with a hatchet, there crawled out hastily some ugly little brown insects that the sailors jumped on with their feet and destroyed.
“Cockroaches are they not, Captain?” I inquired of the grandfather.
“Ha! How do you know that, you little landlubber?” he laughingly responded.
To tell the truth, I had never seen any such insects before; but uncles who had lived in the tropics often spoke of them. And I was delighted to make the acquaintance of these tiny creatures that are peculiar to ships and to warm countries.
Spring! Spring!
The white roses and the jasmine bloomed on our old garden wall, and the deliciously fragrant honeysuckle hung its long garlands over it.
I began to live there from morning until night in closest intimacy with the plants and the old stones. I listened to the sound of the water as it plashed in the shade of the majestic plum tree, I studied the grasses and the wood mosses that grew at the edge of my little lake; and upon the warm side of the garden where the sun shone all through the day, the cactus put out its buds.
My Wednesday evening trips to Limoise commenced again,—and it goes without saying that I dreamed of the beloved place from one week to the next to the detriment of my lessons and my other duties.
I believe that that spring was the most radiant and the most ravishingly happy one of my childhood, in contrast no doubt to the terrible winter spent under the rigorous care of the Great Ape.
Oh! the end of May, the high grass and then the June mowing! In what a glory of golden light I see it all again!
I took evening walks with my father and sister as I had done during my earlier years; they now came to meet me at the close of school, at half-past four, and we set out immediately for the fields. Our preference that spring was for a certain meadow abloom with pink amourettes, and I always brought home great bouquets of these flowers.
In that same meadow a migratory and ephemeral species of moth, black and pink (of the same pink as the amourettes) had hatched out, and they slept poised on the long stalks of the grass, or flew away as lightly as the flowers shed their petals when we walked through the hay. . . . And all of these things appear to me again as I saw them in the exquisite, limpid June atmosphere. . . . During the afternoon classes, the thought of the sun-dappled meadows made me more restless than did even the mild air and the spring odors that came in through the open windows.
I cherish particularly the remembrance of an evening in which my mother had promised, as a special favor, to join us in our walk to the fields of pink amourettes. That afternoon I had been more inattentive than usual, and the Great Ape had threatened to keep me in, and all during my lessons I firmly believed that I was to be punished. This keeping in after school, which shut us away from the beautiful June day an hour longer, was always a cruel torture. But to-day my heart felt particularly heavy as I reflected that mamma would, doubtless, come at the appointed hour and expect me,—and with some bitterness I thought that the springtime was so very short, that the hay would soon need to be cut, and that perhaps there would not be, the whole summer long, such another glorious evening as this one.
As soon as school was over I anxiously consulted the fatal list in the hands of the monitor; my name was not there! The Big Black Ape had forgotten me, or had been merciful!
Oh! with what joy I rushed away to join mamma who had kept her promise and who, with my father and sister, smilingly awaited me. . . . The air that I breathed in was more delicious than ever, it was exquisitely soft and balmy, and the atmosphere had a tropical resplendence.
When I recall that time, when I think of those meadows all abloom with amourettes, and of those pink moths, there is mingled, to my regret, a sort of indefinable pain whose intensity I cannot understand, an anguish I always feel when I find myself in the presence of things that impress and charm me with their undercurrent of mystery.
I have already said that I was extraordinarily childish for my years.
If the personage I then was could but be brought into the presence of the little Parisian boys of twelve or thirteen, educated according to the more perfect modern method, who at so early an age declaim, discuss and harangue, and entertain all sorts of political ideas, I would, I am sure, be struck dumb by their discourses, and how singular they would find me and with what disdain they would treat me!
I am myself astonished at the childishness that I displayed in certain ways, for in artistic perception and imagination, in spite of my lack of method, and lack of real knowledge, I was incontestably more advanced than are the majority of boys of my age; if that youthful journal, the strip of paper wrapped about a reed in the similitude of a conjuring-book, of which I spoke a short time ago, were still in existence it would emphasize twenty fold this pale record, on which it seems to me there has already fallen the dust of ages.
My room where I now scarcely ever installed myself to study, and which I seldom entered except at night to sleep, became, during the beautiful month of June, my palace of delight, and I went there after dinner to enjoy the long, and mild, and beautiful twilights. I had invented a sport which I deemed an improvement upon the rag-rat trick that the dirty little street urchins whisked, at the end of long strings, about the feet and legs of the passers-by. My game amused me greatly and I prosecuted it with vivacity. It would, I think, amuse me still if I dared play it, and I hope that my trick will be imitated by all the youngsters who are imprudently allowed to read this chapter.
On the other side of the street, just opposite my window, and similarly upon the second floor there lived the good old maid, Miss Victoire—(she wore a great old-fashioned frilled cap and round spectacles). I had obtained permission from her to fix to the fastening of her shutter a string that I then brought all across the street and into my window, the remainder of this string I rolled upon a stick, ball-fashion.
In the evening, as soon as the light waned, a bird of my own manufacture—a sort of absurd and impossible crow, made out of iron wire and with black silk wings—came slyly from between my venetian blinds that I immediately closed after the exit of the creature, this bird descended in a droll way and posed on the paving stones in the middle of the street. A ring on which it was suspended, and which allowed it to slip freely the length of the string, was not visible because of the dim light, and from time to time I made the crow hop and skip comically about on the ground.
And when the passers-by paused to gaze at this unlikely looking bird that fluttered about so gayly—whiz! I would pull the string that I held firmly in my hand, and the bird would leap from under their very noses and mount high in the air.
Oh! how amused I was, those beautiful evenings, when I peeped out from behind my venetian blinds; how I laughed to myself over the surprised exclamations and the bewilderment of those fooled, and how I enjoyed rehearsing to myself their probable reflections and guesses. And to me the most astonishing part was that after the first moment of surprise, the persons whom I tricked laughed as heartily as I; it should be mentioned that the majority of those passing were neighbors who must certainly have had some inkling of the mystifying joke about to be played on them. I was much loved in the neighborhood at that time. Or if the pedestrians chanced to be sailors, the easy going fellows, themselves only grown children, were much delighted with my child's play.
What will always remain an incomprehensible mystery to me is that in my family, where we seldom sinned through an excess of reserve towards each other, they shut their eyes to my trick, and thus tacitly gave me permission to play it during the entire spring; I am not able to explain to myself how it chanced that they failed to correct me, and the years instead of clearing up this mystery only serve to intensify it.
That black bird has naturally become one of my many relics; at intervals, during the past two or three years, I have looked at it; it is somewhat dingy, but it always recalls to me the beautiful evenings in June, now vanished, the delicious intoxication of that springtime of long ago.
Those Thursdays at Limoise when the fierce heat of the noon-day sun overwhelmed everything, and the country side lay asleep and silent under its pitiless rays, it was my habit to clamber up to the top of the old wall that enclosed the garden, and there I sat astride and immovable for a long time. The branching ivy reached to my shoulders and innumerable flies and locusts buzzed around me. From the height of this observatory I had a view of the hot and lonely region lying beyond, of the moorland and woodland, and from there I saw a thin white veil of mist that was agitated ceaselessly by the waves of heat, as the surface of a tiny lake is ruffled by the least wind. Those horizons seen from Limoise still had for me the strange mystery I had endowed them with in the first summers of my life. The region visible from the top of the wall was a rather solitary one, and I tried to make myself believe that the waste land and woodland was a veritable untrodden country that stretched out indefinitely; and although I now knew well that about me everywhere there were roads; cultivated fields, and prosperous villages, I succeeded in clinging to the illusion that the surrounding country and contiguous lands were wild and primitive.
And the better to deceive myself I took care to shut out, by looking through my fingers folded together spy-glass fashion, all that would have spoiled for me the impression of loneliness; an old farm house, for instance, with its bit of cultivated vineyard and smooth road.
And there all alone, in that silence murmurous with the buzzing of many insects, distracted by nothing, always turning my hollowed hand towards the most desolate portion of the landscape, I succeeded in gaining an impression of distant, tropical countries.
I had impressions of Brazil particularly, but I do not know why in those moments of contemplation the neighboring forest always suggested that country to me.
In passing I must describe this forest, the first one of all the earth's forests that I knew, and the one I loved the best: the straight, slim trunks of the ancient evergreen oaks, of sombre foliage, were like the columns of a church; not a particle of brush grew under them, but the dry soil was covered all the year with the most exquisite short grass, soft and fine as down, and here and there grew furze, dropwort and other rare flowers that thrive in the shade.
The Iliad was being explained to us in class,—no doubt I would have loved it, but our master had made it odious by his analysis, his difficult tasks and his parrot-like recitals;—but suddenly I stopped, filled with admiration of a famous line, whose end is musical as the murmur of the waves of the incoming tide as they spread their sheets of foam upon the pebbly shore.
“Observe,” said the Big Ape, “observe the inceptive harmony.”
Zounds! Yes, I had observed it. Little need to take the trouble to point out such a sentence to me.
I also had a great admiration, less justified perhaps, for some lines from Virgil.
Since the beginning of the Ecloque I had, with the greatest interest, followed the two shepherds as they made their way across the fields of ancient Rome. I could picture it to myself so vividly, those Roman meadows of two thousand years ago: hot, a little sterile, with thickets of almost petrified shrubs, and evergreen oaks like the stony moorland of Limoise, where I had experienced precisely the pastoral charm that I discovered in this description of a past time.
Onward went the two shepherds, and suddenly, they perceived that their journey was half over, “because the tomb of Bianor was immediately below them . . .” Oh! how vividly I saw that tomb of Bianor disclose itself to their view. Its old stones, that made a white blot on the reddish road, were covered with tiny sun-scorched plants, wild thyme or marjoram, and here and there grew stunted dark foliaged shrubs. And the sonority of the word Bianoris with which the sentence ended suddenly and magically evoked for me the musical humming of the insects that buzzed around the two travellers who, upon that bygone day in June, walked onward in the great silence and serene tranquillity of the hot noon enkindled by a younger sun. I was no longer in the schoolroom; I was in the meadows with the shepherds walking with them this radiant summer day through the sun-scorched flowers and grass of a Roman field,—but still all seemed softened and vague as if looked at through a telescope that had the power to draw into its line of vision ages long past.
Who knows? Perhaps if the Big Ape could but have divined the causes that led to my momentary inattention it might have brought about an understanding between us.
One Thursday evening at Limoise, just before the inevitable hour for my departure, I went up alone to the large, old room on the second floor in which I slept. First I leaned out of the open window to watch the July sun sink behind the stony fields and fern heaths that lay towards the sea, which though very near us was invisible. These sunsets at the end of my Thursday holidays always overwhelmed me with melancholy.
During the last minutes of my stay I felt a desire, one I had never known before, to rummage in the old Louis XV bookcase that stood near my bed. There among the volumes in their century-old bindings, where the worms, never disturbed, slowly bored their galleries, I found a book made of thick rough old-fashioned paper, and this I opened carelessly. . . . In it I read, with a thrill of emotion, that from noon until four o'clock in the afternoon, on the 20th of June, 1813, south of the equator, in longitude 110 and latitude 15 (between the tropics, consequently, and in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean) there was fair weather, a beautiful sea, a fine southeast breeze, and in the sky many little clouds called “cat-tails,” and that alongside the ship dolphins were passing.
He who had seen the dolphins pass, and who had recorded the fugitive cloud forms had doubtless been dead for many years. I knew that the book was what is called a ship's log-book, one in which seafaring people write every day. Its appearance did not strike me as strange, although I had never before had one in my hand. But for me it was a wonderful and unexpected experience to thus suddenly come into a knowledge of the aspect of the sea and sky in the midst of the South Pacific Ocean, at a given time in a year long past. . . . Oh! for a glimpse of that beautiful and tranquil sea, of those “cat-tails” that dotted the deep blue arch of the sky, and of those dolphins that swiftly traversed the lonely southern waters!
In this sailor's life, in this profession so terrifying (a career forbidden to me), how many delightful things happened! I had never until this evening realized it with such intensity.
The memory of that hasty little reading is the reason why, during my watches at sea, whenever a helmsman signals a passage of dolphins, I have always turned my eyes in their direction to watch them; and it has always given me a peculiar pleasure to note the incident in the log-book, differing so little from the one in which the sailors of June, 1813, had written before me.
During the vacation that followed, our departure for the south and the mountains enchanted me more than did my first trip there.
As in the preceding summer we started, my sister and I, at the beginning of August. While it was no longer a journey of adventure, the pleasure of returning and again finding there all the things that had formerly so delighted me surpassed the charm of going forth to meet the unknown.
Between the point where the railroad ended and the village in which our cousins lived, in the course of the long carriage ride, our little coachman, in venturing to take what he supposed a short cut, lost his way, and he carried us into the most exquisite forest nooks. The weather was beautiful and radiant. With what joy I saluted the first peasant women whom I saw walking along with great copper water-jars upon their heads, and the first swarthy peasants conversing in the well remembered dialect, how I rejoiced when we rolled along over the blood-colored roads, and when the mountains junipers came into view.
At about noon-time we stopped in a shady valley in a sequestered village called Veyrac to rest our horses, and we seated ourselves at the foot of a chestnut tree. There we were attacked by the ducks of the place, the boldest and most ill bred in the world. They flocked around us in an unseemly manner, uttering shrill cries and quacking hideously. As we departed, even after we were in our carriage, these infuriated creatures followed us; whereupon my sister turned towards them, and with all the dignity of an old-time traveller outraged by an inhospitable population exclaimed: “Ducks of Veyrac, be ye accursed!” And for several years I could not keep a straight face when I remembered the foolish and prolonged laughter that I indulged in at the time. Above all I cannot think of that day without regretting the resplendence of the sun and the blue sky, a resplendence that I never see now.
As we drew near we were met on our way at the bridge spanning the river, by our cousins and the Peyrals. I discovered with pleasure that my little band was complete. We had all grown taller by several inches; but we found immediately that we were not otherwise changed, we were still children ready for the same childish games.
At night-fall there was a terrific storm. And while the thunder boomed around us as if it was bombarding the roof of my uncle's house, and when all the old stone gargoyles in the village were pouring forth torrents of water that rushed tumultuously over the black pebbles in the street, we took refuge, the little Peyrals and I, in the kitchen, and there we made a racket and joyously danced around in a ring.
It was a very large kitchen, furnished in an old-fashioned way with a perfect arsenal of burnished copper utensils; every variety of pan and kettle, shining like pieces of armor, hung on the halls in the order of their size. It was almost dark, and from the moist earth came the fresh odor one usually smells after a storm, after a summer rain; and through the thick iron-barred Louis XIII windows the lurid, green lightning flashed incessantly and blinded us and compelled us, in spite of ourselves, to close our eyes. We turned round and round like mad beings, and sang together: “The star of night whose peaceful light.” . . . It was a sentimental song, never intended for dance music, but we scanned it drolly and mockingly, and thus made of it an accommodating and tuneful dance measure. We continued our joyous sport for I do not know how long a time; we were excited by the noise of the storm and we whirled around like little dervishes; it was a merry-making in celebration of my return; it was a fitting way of inaugurating the holidays; it was a defiance to the Big Ape, and it was an appropriate prologue to the series of expeditions and childish sports of every kind that were to recommence, with more ardor than ever, the next day.
The following morning at daybreak when I awoke, a noisy cadence, to which I was unaccustomed, fell upon my ears; the neighboring weaver had already commenced, even with the dawn, to work his ancient loom, and the musical to and fro of its shuttle had roused me. Then after the first drowsy, dreamy moment I remembered, with overwhelming joy, that I was at my uncle's in the south; that this was the morning of the first day; that I had before me the prospect of a whole summer of out-of-door life and wildest liberty—had August and September, two months that at present pass as quickly as if they were but two days, but which then seemed of a fairly respectable duration. With a feeling of rapture, after I had wholly shaken off my sleep, I came into a full consciousness of myself and the realities of my life; I felt “joy at my waking.”
The preceding winter I had read a story of the Indians of the Great Lakes, and one thing in it had impressed me so deeply that I always remembered it: an old Indian chief, whose daughter was pining away because of her love for a white man, had finally consented to give her to the alien so that she might once more feel “joy at her waking.”
Joy at her waking! Indeed, for some time I had myself noticed that the moment of waking is always the one in which I had the most distinct and vivid impression of joy or sorrow; and it is then, at the waking hour, that one finds it so particularly painful to be without joy; my first little sorrows and remorses, my anxieties about the future, were the things that usually obtruded themselves cruelly—however the feeling of sadness vanished very quickly in those days.
At a later time I had very gloomy and sad awakenings. And there are times now when I have moments of terrifying clearness of vision during which I seem to see, if I may so express it, into the depths of life; it is at such moments that life presents itself to me without those pleasing mirages that during the day still delude me; during those moments I appear to have a more vivid realization of the rapid flight of the years, the crumbling away of all that I endeavor to hold to, I almost realize the final unimaginable nothingness, I see the bottomless pit of death, near at hand, no longer in any way disguised.
But that morning I had a joyful awaking, and unable to remain quietly in bed, I rose immediately. So impatient was I to be out that I scarcely took time to ask myself where I should begin my first day's round of visits.
I had all the nooks and corners of the village to see again, the gothic ramparts and the lovely river; and my uncle's garden to revisit, where probably, since last year, the rarest butterflies had become domiciled. I had visits to make to the ancient and curious houses in the neighborhood, where lived all the kind old women who, in the past summer, had lavished upon me their most luscious grapes as if they were my feudal due;—there was in particular a certain Madame Jeanne, a rich old peasant, who had taken so great a fancy to me that she liked to humor my every whim, and who, for my amusement, every time she passed on her way, like Nausicaa, from the washing-place, looked comically out of the corner of her eyes towards my uncle's house. And, too, there were the surrounding vineyards, and woods, and mountain paths; and beyond, Castelnau, rearing its battlements and towers above the pedestal of chestnuts and oak trees, called me to its ruins! Where should I run first, and how could I ever weary of so beautiful a land!
The sea, to which I was now scarcely ever taken, was for the moment completely forgotten.
After these two happy months school was to re-open. I could not bear to think of it, but its monotony would be broken by a great event, the return of my brother. His four years were not quite completed; but we knew that he had already left the “mysterious island,” and we expected him to arrive home in October. For me it would be like becoming acquainted with a stranger. I was somewhat anxious to know whether he would love me when he met me, if he would approve of a thousand little things I did,—how, for instance, my way of playing Beethoven would please him.
I thought constantly of his approaching arrival; I was so overjoyed, and I anticipated with so keen a delight the change his coming would make in my life, that I did not feel a particle of the melancholy which usually beset me in the autumn.
I meant to consult him about a thousand troublous matters, to confide to him all my anguish and uncertainty in regard to the future; I knew also that my parents depended upon him to give them definite advice about me, and expected him to direct me towards a scientific career: that was the one dark spot upon his return.
Awaiting his dread decision, I threw aside all care and amused myself as gayly as possible; I put even less restraint than usual upon myself during the vacation which I regarded as likely to be the very last of my childhood.
After the noon dinner it was the custom in my uncle's house to sit for an hour or two in the entry-way of the house, that vestibule inlaid with flagstones and ornamented with a large, burnished, copper fountain, for it was the coolest place during the heated period of the day. Here it was almost dark, for everything was closed; two or three rays of sunshine, in whose light the flies danced, filtered in through the cracks of the massive Louis XIII door. In the silent village no one was astir, and one heard there only the everlasting clucking of the hens,—all other living creatures seemed asleep.
I, however, did not remain long in the cool vestibule. The bright sunshine lured me out; and, too, scarcely had I installed myself there in the circle before I heard a knocking at the street door: the three little Peyrals had come to fetch me, and to apprise me of their presence they lifted the old iron knocker that was hot enough to burn their fingers.
Then with hats pulled over our eyes and equipped with hammers, staffs and butterfly-nets we would start out in search of new adventures. First we passed through the narrow gothic streets paved with pebbles, then we struck into the paths that lay just beyond the village, paths that were always covered with wheat-chaff that got into our shoes, and into which we sank ankle deep; finally we reached the open country, the vineyards, and the roads that led to the woods, or better still those that brought us to the river which we forded by means of the flower-covered islets.
This wild liberty was a complete avengement for the monotony of my cribbed and cabined home life, ever the same all the year through; but I still lacked the companionship of little boys of my own age, I needed to clash with them,—and, too, this freedom lasted only a couple of months.
One day I had a great desire, wherefore I do not know, unless out of pure bravado and the spirit of perversity, to do something unseemly. After having searched all of one morning for this something I found it.
It is well known that the swarms of flies which one finds in the south during the summer, and which contaminate everything are a veritable plague. I knew that there was a trap set for them in the middle of my uncle's kitchen. It was a treacherous pipe of a special shape, at the bottom of which, in the soapy pan of water there, the flies were invariably drowned. Now on the particular day in which I felt so devilish I bethought me of that disgusting blackish mass at the bottom of the vessel, made up of the thousands of flies drowned during the past two or three days, and I wondered what sort of toothsome dish I should make of it, a pancake, perhaps, or better still, an omelette.
Quickly and nervously, and with a loathing that almost made me vomit, I poured the pasty black mass into a plate and carried it to the house of old Madame Jeanne, the only one in the world willing to do anything and everything for me.
“A fly omelette! To be sure! Why not! That is very simple!” she exclaimed. She went immediately to the fire with a frying pan and some eggs. She gave the unclean mess a good preliminary beating, and then she placed it on her high and ancient fireplace. As I watched her procedure I was dismayed and surprised at myself.
But the three little Peyrals, whom I had met unexpectedly, went into such ecstasies over my idea, a thing they always did, that I was fortified; and when the omelette, at just the right time, was turned out hot upon a plate we started forth triumphantly to carry the exhibit home to show to our families. We formed a procession in the order of our respective heights, and as we marched we sang, “The Star of Night” in voices loud and hoarse enough to summon the devil to earth.
In the mountains the end of summer was always a beautiful season, for the meadows lying at the foot of the hillside forests, already yellow, were purple with crocuses. Then, too, the vintage commenced and lasted for about fifteen days,—days of enchantment for us.
We now spent most of our time in the shady nooks of the woods and meadows in the neighborhood of the Peyral vineyards; there we had play-dinners consisting of candy and fruits. We would spread out on the grass what we considered a most elegant cloth, and this we decorated, after the old fashion, with garlands of flowers, and we put on it plates made of yellow and red vine leaves. The vintagers brought us the most luscious grapes, bunches chosen from among a thousand; and, with the heat of the sun to aid, we sometimes became a little tipsy, not, however, made so by sweet wine, for we had drunk none, but by the juice of the grapes merely, in the self-same fashion as did the wasps and flies that warmed themselves upon the trellises. . . .
One morning at the end of September, when the weather was rainy and it was chilly enough for me to realize that melancholy autumn was near at hand, I was attracted into the kitchen by the bright wood fire that leaped gayly in the high, old-fashioned chimney-place. And as I stood there, idle and out of sorts, because of the rain, I amused myself by melting a pewter plate and plunging it, in its liquid state, into a pail of water.
The result was a shapeless, bright, and silvery-gray lump which very much resembled silver-ore. I looked at the mass thoughtfully for some time: an idea germinated, and there and then I planned a new amusement which became our most delightful pastime during those last days of vacation.
That same evening we held a conference on the steps of the great stairway, and I told the Peyrals that from the aspect of the soil and the plants I had come to the conclusion that there were silver mines in this part of the country. As I spoke I assumed the knowing and bold airs of one of those venturesome scouts, who is usually the principal personage in old-fashioned stories of American adventure.
Searching for mines fell well into line with the abilities of my little band, for often, armed with pick and shovel, they had set out to discover fossils or rare stones.
The next day, therefore, half way up the mountain, when we arrived at a path chosen by me for its appropriateness, for it was lonely and mysterious, shut in by forest trees and embedded between high, moss-grown, rocky banks, I stopped my little band peremptorily, as if I were endowed with the keen scent of an Indian chief. I pretended that I had here recognized the presence of precious ore-beds; and, in truth, when we dug in the place I indicated we found the first nuggets, the melted plate that I had buried there the day before.
These mines occupied us constantly until the end of my stay. The Peyrals were convinced and full of amazement, and although I spent some time each morning in the kitchen melting plates and covers to feed our vein of silver, I very nearly deluded myself into believing in the reality of the mine.
The isolated silent spot, so exquisitely beautiful, where these excavations took place, and the melancholy but enchanting serenity of the end of summer, gave a rare charm to our little dream of adventure. We were, however, most amusingly secret and mysterious in regard to our discovery; we considered it a tribal secret, and we cherished it as such.
Our riches, mixed in with some of the red mountain soil, we hoarded in an old trunk in my uncle's attic as if the latter were an Ali Baba's cave.
We pledged ourselves to leave it there during the winter, until the next vacation, at which time we counted on making additions to our treasure.
In the first week of October we received a joyous telegram from our father bidding us leave for home as speedily as possible. My brother, who was returning to Europe by a packet-boat on its way from Panama, was to disembark at Southampton; we had but just time to reach home if we wished to be there to welcome him.
We arrived the evening of the third day just in time, for my brother was expected a few hours later on the night train. I had barely time to put into his room, in their accustomed places, the various little trinkets that he had four years previously confided to my care, before the hour set for our departure to the station to meet him. To me his return, announced so unexpectedly, did not seem a reality, and I was so excited that for two nights I scarcely slept at all.
This is why, in spite of my impatience to see my brother, I fell asleep at the station; when he appeared it seemed a sort of dream to me. I embraced him timidly, for he was very different from my mental image of him. He was bronzed and bearded, his manner of speech was more rapid, and, with a slightly smiling, slightly anxious expression, he regarded me fixedly, as if to ascertain what the years had done for me, and to deduce from that what my future was to be.
When I returned home I fell asleep standing; it wad the dead sleepiness of a child fatigued by a long journey, against which it is futile to struggle, and I was carried to my bed.
I awaked the following morning with a feeling of joyousness that penetrated to the very depths of my being, and as I remembered the cause for my happiness my eyes fell upon an extraordinary object standing on a table in my room. It was evidently a very slim canoe with a balance beam and sails. Then my gaze encountered other unfamiliar objects scattered about: necklaces of shells strung on human hair, head-dresses of feathers, ornaments appertaining to a dark and primitive savagery; it was as if distant Polynesia had come to me during my sleep. My brother, it seems had already begun to open his cases, and while I slept he had slipped noiselessly into my room and grouped around me these ornaments intended for my museum.
I jumped out of bed quickly so that I might go and find him, for I had scarcely seen him the evening before.
And it seems I hardly saw him during those hurried weeks that he spent with us. Of that period, which lasted so short a time, I have very confused visions, similar to those one has of things seen during a rapid journey. I remember vaguely that we lived more gayly, and that his presence among us brought many young people to our house. I remember also that he seemed at times to be preoccupied and absorbed by things entirely outside the family sphere; perhaps he had longings for the tropics, for the “delicious island,” or it may be he dreaded his early departure.
Sometimes I held him captive near the piano by playing for him the haunting music of Chopin which I had but just begun to understand. He was disquieted however by my playing, and he said that Chopin's music was too exuberant and at the same time too enervating for me. He had come among us so recently that he was better able to judge of me than were the others, and he realized perhaps that my intellect was in danger of becoming warped through the nature of the artistic and intellectual effort it put forth; no doubt he thought Chopin and the “Donkey's Skin” equally dangerous, and considered that I was becoming excessively affected and abnormal in spite of my fits of childish behavior. I am sure that he thought even my amusements were fanciful and unhealthy. Be that as it may, he one day, to my great joy, decreed that I should learn to ride horseback, but that was the only change his coming made in my education. Cowardice prompted me to defer discussion of those weighty questions appertaining to my future which I was so anxious to talk over with him; I preferred to take my time, and, too, I shrunk from making a decision, and thus by my silence I sought to prolong my childhood. Besides, I did not consider it a pressing matter after all, inasmuch as he was to be with us for some years. . . .
But one fine morning, although we had reckoned so largely on keeping him, there came news of a higher rank and an order from the naval department commanding him to start without delay for a distant part of the orient, where an expedition was organizing.
After a few days which were mainly spent in preparing for that unforeseen campaign he left us as if borne away by a gust of wind.
Our adieus were less sad this time, for we did not expect him to be absent more than two years. . . . In reality it was his eternal farewell to us; whatever is left of his body lies at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, towards the middle of the Bay of Bengal.
When he had departed, while the noise of the carriage that was bearing him away could still be heard, my mother turned to me with an expression of love that touched me to the very innermost fibre of my being; and as she drew me to her she said with the emphasis of conviction: “Thank God, at least we shall keep you with us!”
Keep me! . . . They would keep me! . . . Oh! . . . I lowered my head and turned my eyes away, for I could feel that their expression had changed, had become a little wild. I could not respond to my mother with a word or a caress.
Such a serene confidence upon her part distressed me cruelly, for the moment in which I heard her say, “We shall keep you,” I understood, for the first time in my life, what a firm hold on my mind the project of going away had taken—of going even farther than my brother, of going everywhere upon the face of the earth.
A sea-faring life terrified me, and I relished the idea of it as little as ever. To a little being like me, so greatly attached to my home, bound to it by a thousand sweet ties, the very thought of it made my heart bleed. And besides, how could I break the news of such a decision to my parents, how give them so much pain and thus flagrantly outrage their wishes! But to renounce all my plans, always to remain in the same place, to be upon this earth, and to see nothing of it—what a squalid, disenchanting future! What was the use to live, what the good of growing up for that?
And in that empty parlor with its disordered chairs, one even overturned, and while I was still under the dark spell of our sad farewells, there beside my mother, leaning against her with eyes turned away and with soul overwhelmed with sorrow, I suddenly remembered the old log-book which I had read at sunset last spring at Limoise. The short sentences written down upon the old paper with yellow ink came slowly back to me one after the other with a charm as lulling and perfidious as that exercised by a magic incantation:
“Fair weather . . . beautiful sea . . . light breeze from the south-east . . . Shoals of dolphins . . . passing to larboard.”
And with a shudder of almost religious awe, with pantheistic ecstasy, my inward eye saw all about me the sad and vast blue splendor of the South Pacific Ocean.
A great calm, tinged with melancholy, fell upon us after my brother's departure, and to me the days were monotonous in the extreme.
They had always thought of sending me to the Polytechnic school, but it had not been decided upon irrevocably. The wish to become a sailor, which had obtruded itself upon me almost against my will, charmed and terrified me in an almost equal degree; I lacked the courage necessary to settle such a grave matter with myself, and I always hesitated to speak of it. The upshot was that I decided to reflect over it until my next vacation, and thus by my irresolution and delay I secured to myself a few more months of careless childhood.
I still led as solitary a life as ever; it was very difficult for me to change the bent that my mind had taken in spite of my mental distress and in spite of my latent desire to roam far and wide over the earth. More than ever I stayed in the house and busied myself painting stage scenery, and playing Chopin and Beethoven; to all appearances I was tranquil and deeply absorbed in my dreams, and I became ever more and more attached to my home, to its every nook and corner, even to the stones in its walls. It is true that now and again I took a horseback ride, but I always went with a groom and never with children of my own age—I still had no young playmates.
My second year at college was much less painful than my first; it passed more quickly, and moreover I had formed an attachment for two of my classmates, my elders by a year or two, the only ones who had not the preceding year treated me disdainfully. The thin ice once broken, there had sprung up between us an ardent and sentimental friendship; we even called each other by our baptismal names, something that was contrary to school etiquette. Since we never saw each other except in the schoolroom, we were obliged to communicate in mysterious whispers under the teacher's eye, our relations, consequently, were inalterably courteous and did not resemble the ordinary friendship between boys. I loved them with all my heart; I would have allowed myself to be cut into bits for them; and, in all sincerity, I imagined that this affection would endure throughout my life.
My excessive exclusiveness caused me to treat the others in the class with great indifference and haughtiness; still a certain superficial self, necessary for social purposes, had already begun to take shallow root, and I knew better now how to remain on good terms with them, and at the same time to keep my true self hidden from them.
I generally contrived to sit between my two friends, Andre and Paul. If, however, we were separated we continually and slyly exchanged notes written in a cipher to which we alone had the key.
These letters were always love confidences: “I have seen her to-day; she wore a blue dress trimmed with gray fur, and she had a lark's wing on her turban, etc.”—For we had chosen sweethearts who became the subject of our very poetical prattle.
Something of the ridiculous and whimsical invariably marks this transition age in a boy's life, and for that reason I have thought it worth while to transcribe the boyish note.
Before going further I wish to say that my transition periods have lasted longer than do those of the majority of men, and during them I have been carried from one extreme to another; and, too they have caused me to touch all the perilous rocks along life's way,—I am also fully conscious of the fact that until almost my twenty-fifth year I had eccentric and absurd manners. . . .
But now I will continue with my confidences respecting our three love affairs.
Andre was ardently in love with a young lady almost six years older than himself who had already been introduced into society,—I believe that his affair was a case of real and deep affection.
I had chosen Jeanne for my sweetheart, and my two friends were the only beings who knew my secret. To do as they did, although I considered it a little silly, I wrote her name in cipher on the covers of my copy-books; in every way and manner I sought to persuade myself of the ardor of my passion, but I am bound to admit that the whole thing was a little artificial, for the amusing coquetry that Jeanne and I had indulged in early in our acquaintance had developed into a true and great friendship, a hereditary friendship I may call it, a continuation of that felt by our ancestors long before our birth. No, my first real love, of which I will soon speak, was for a being seen in a dream.
As for Paul—alas! His heart affair was very shocking to me, for it did particular violence to the ideas that I then had. He was in love with a little shop-girl who worked in a perfumery store, and on his Sunday holidays he gazed at her through the show-case window. It is true that she was named Stella or Olympia, and that raised her somewhat in my esteem; and, too, Paul took pains to surround his love with an ethereal and poetic atmosphere in order to make it more acceptable to us. At the bottom of his cipher notes he constantly wrote, for our benefit, the sweetest rhymed verses dedicated to her, wherein her name, ending in “a,” recurred again and again, like the perfume of musk.
In spite of my great affection for him I could not but smile pityingly over his poetic effusions. And I think that it is partly because of them that I have never, at any epoch in my life, had the least inclination to write a single line of verse. My notes were always written in a wild and free prose that outraged every rule.