Before I finish writing of the confused memories I have of the commencement of my life I wish to speak of another ray of sunshine—a sad ray this time,—that has left an ineffaceable impression upon me, and the meaning of which will never be clear to me.
Upon a Sunday, after we had returned from church, the ray appeared to me. It came through a half-open window and fell into the stairway, and as it lengthened itself upon the whiteness of the wall it took on a peculiar, weird shape.
I had returned from church with my mother and as I mounted the stairs I took her hand. The house was filled with a humming silence peculiar to the noontime of very hot summer days (it was August or September). Following the habit of our country the shutters were half closed making indoors, during the heated period of the day, a sort of twilight.
As I entered the house there came to me an appreciation of the stillness of Sunday that in the country and in peaceful byways of little towns is like the peace of death. But when I saw the ray of sunlight fall obliquely through the staircase window, I had a feeling more poignant than ordinary sorrow; I had a feeling altogether incomprehensible and absolutely new in which there seemed infused a conception of the brevity of life's summers, their rapid flight and the incomputable ages of the sun. But other elements still more mysterious, that it would be impossible for me to explain even vaguely, entered therein.
I wish to add to the history of this ray of sunshine the sequel that is intimately connected with it. Years passed; I became a man, and after having been among many people and experienced many adventures I lived for an autumn and winter in an isolated house in an unfrequented part of Stamboul. It was there that every evening at approximately the same hour, a ray of sunlight came in through the window and fell obliquely on the wall and lit up the niche (hollowed out of the stone wall) in which I had placed an Athenian vase. And I never saw that ray of sunlight without thinking of the one I had seen upon that Sunday of long ago; nor without having the same, precisely the same sad emotion, scarcely diminished by time, and always full of the same mystery. And when I had to leave Turkey, when I was obliged to quit my dangerous but adored lodgings in Stamboul, with all my busy and hurried preparations for departure there was mingled this strange regret: never more should I see the oblique ray of sunshine come into the stairway window and fall upon the niche in the wall where the Greek vase stood.
Perhaps under all of this there may have been, if not recollections of a previous personal experience, at least the reflected inchoate thoughts of ancestors which I am unable in any clearer way to bring out of darkness. But enough! I must say no more, for I again find myself in the land of vague fancy, gliding phantoms and illusive nothings.
For this almost unintelligible chapter there is no excuse that I can offer, save that I have written it with the greatest frankness and sincerity.
And I now recall the impressions of springtime, all the fresh splendor of May; and I remember vividly the lonely road called the Fountain road.
(As I am endeavoring to put my recollections into some sort of order I think that at this time I must have been about five years old.)
I was old enough at any rate to take walks with my father and my sister, and I went out with them this dewy morning. I was in ecstasy to see that everything had become so green, to see the budding foliage and the tasselled shrubs and hedges. Along the sides of the road the grass was all the same length, and the flowers in the grass with their exquisite mingling of the red of the geranium and the blue of the speedwell, made the whole earth seem a great bouquet. As I plucked the flowers I scarcely knew which way to run; in my eagerness I trod upon them and my legs became wet from the dew—I marvelled at all the richness at my disposal, and I longed to take great armfuls of the flowers and carry them away with me.
My sister, who had gathered a sprig of hawthorn, one of iris and some long sheath-like grasses leaned towards me, and took my hand, and said: “You have enough for the present; you see, dear, that we could never gather all of them.”
But I did not heed, so absolutely intoxicated was I with the magnificence about me, the like of which I did not recall ever to have seen before.
That was the beginning of those almost daily excursions that I took with my father and sister, and that I kept up for so long a time (almost to my boarding-school days). It is through them that I became so well acquainted with the surrounding country and with the varieties of flowers found there. Poor fields and meadows of my native country! So monotonous, so flat, one so like another; fields of hay and daisies where in childhood I would disappear from sight and hide under the green vegetation. Fields of corn and paths bordered with hawthorn, I love you all in spite of your monotony!
Toward the west, in the far distance, my eyes sought for a glimpse of the sea. Sometimes when we had gone a long way there would appear upon the horizon, among the other lines there, a straight bluish one; it was the sea; and it lured me to it finally as a great and patient lover lures, who sure of his power is willing to wait.
My sister and my brother, of whom I have not spoken before, were considerably older than I; it seemed almost as if we belonged to different generations. For that reason they petted me even more than did my father and mother, my grandmother and aunts; and as I was the only child among them I was cherished like a little hot-house plant, I was too tenderly guarded and remained all too unacquainted with thorns and brambles.
Someone has advanced the theory that those persons endowed with a gift for painting (either with color or with words) probably belong to a half-blind species; accustomed to living in a partial light, in a sort of misty grayness, they turn their gaze inward; and when by chance they do look out their impressions are ten times more vivid than are those of ordinary people.
To me that seems a little paradoxical.
But it is true that sometimes an enveloping darkness aids one to clearer vision; as in a panorama building, for example, where the obscurity about the entrance prepares one better for the climax, and gives the scene depicted a more real and vivid appearance.
In the course of my life I would without doubt have been less impressed by the ever shifting phantasmagoria of existence had I not begun my journey in a place almost without distinctive color, in a tranquil corner of the most commonplace little town, receiving an education austerely pious; and where my longest journey was bounded by the forests of Limoise (as wonderful to me as a primeval forest) and by the shores of the island of Oleron, that seemed very immense when I went to it to visit my aged aunts.
But after all is said, it was in the yard about our house that I passed the happiest of my summers—it seemed to me that that was my particular kingdom, and I adored it.
It was in truth a beautiful yard, much more sunny and airy than the majority of city gardens. Its long avenue of green and flowery branches, that overtopped the heads of the neighboring fruit trees, was bordered on the south by a low and ancient wall over which grew roses and honeysuckles. The long leafy avenue gave the impression of great depth, and its perspective melted into a bower of vines and jasmine bushes that in turn became a great verdant place, which came to an end at a storehouse of ancient construction, whose gray stones were hidden under ivy vines.
Ah! How I loved that garden, and how much I still love it!
I believe the keenest, earliest memories are of the beautiful long summer evenings. Oh! the return from a walk during those long, clear twilights that certainly were more delicious than are those of to-day. What joy to re-enter that yard which the thorn-apples and the honeysuckles filled with the sweetest odor, to enter and see from the gate all the long avenue of tangled greenness. Through an opening in a bower of Virginia Creeper I could see the rosy splendor of the setting sun; and somewhat removed in the gathering shadows of the foliage, there were distinguishable three or four persons. The persons, it is true, were very quiet and they were dressed in black, but they were nevertheless very reassuring to me, very familiar and very much beloved: they were the forms of mother, grandmother and aunts. Then I would run to them hastily and throw myself upon their laps, and that was always one of the happiest moments of my day.
In the month of March, as the shadows of twilight gathered, two little children were seated very close together upon a low footstool—two little ones, between the ages of five and six, dressed in short trousers with white pinafores over them, as was the fashion of the time. After having played wildly they were now quietly amusing themselves with paper and pencils. The dim light seemed to fill them with a vague fear, and it troubled their spirits.
Of the two children only one was drawing—it was I. The other, a friend invited over for the day, an exceptional thing, was watching me with great attention. With some difficulty (trusting me meantime) he followed the fantastic movements of my pencil whose intention I took care to explain to him at some length. And my oral interpretation was necessary, for I was busy executing two drawings that I entitled respectively, “The Happy Duck” and “The Unhappy Duck.”
The room in which we were seated must have been furnished about the year 1805, at the time of the marriage of my now-very-old grandmother, who still occupied it, and who this evening was seated in the chair of the Directory period; she was singing to herself and she took no notice of us.
My memories of my grandmother are indistinct for her death occurred shortly after this time; but as I will never again, in the course of this recital, have a more vivid impression of her, I will here insert what I know of her history.
It seems that in the stress of all sorts of troubles she had been a brave and noble mother. After reverses that were so general in those days, after losing her husband at the Battle of Trafalgar, and her elder son at the shipwreck of the Medusa, she went resolutely to work to educate her younger son, my father, until such time as he should be able to support himself. At about her eightieth year (which was not far distant when I came into the world) the senility of second childhood had set in; at that time I knew nothing about the tragedy of the loss of memory and I could not realize the vacancy of her mind and soul.
She would often stand for a long time before a mirror and talk in a most amiable way to her own reflection, which she called, “my good neighbor” or “my dear neighbor.” It was also her mania to sing with a most excessive ardor the Marseillaise, the Parisiennes, the “Song of Farewell,” and all the noble songs of the transition time, which had been the rage in her young womanhood.
During these exciting times she had lived quietly, and had occupied herself entirely with her household cares and her son's education. For that reason it seems the more singular that from her disordered mind, just about as it was to take its journey into complete darkness and to become disintegrated through death, there should come this tardy echo of that tempestuous time.
I enjoyed listening to her very much and often I would laugh, but without any irreverence, and I never was the least afraid of her. She was extremely lovely and had delicate and regular features, and her expression was very sweet. Her abundant hair was silver-gray, and upon her cheeks there was a color similar to that of a faded rose leaf, a color which the old people of that generation often retained into extreme old age. I remember that she usually wore a red cashmere shawl about her shoulders, and that she always had on an old-fashioned cap trimmed with green ribbons. There was something very modest and gentle and pleasing about her still graceful little body.
Her room, where I liked to come to play because it was so large and sunny, was furnished as simply as a Presbyterian parsonage: the waxed walnut furniture was of the Directory period, the large bed had a canopy of thick, red, cotton stuff and the walls were painted an ochre yellow; and upon them in gilt frames, slightly tarnished, were hung water colors representing vases of flowers. I very soon discovered that this room was furnished in a very simple and old-fashioned way, and I thought to myself that the good old grandmother who sang so constantly must be much poorer than my other grandmother, who was younger by twenty years, and who always dressed in black—which last matter seemed an elegant distinction to me.
But to return to my drawings! I think that the pictures of those two ducks, occupying such different stations in life, were the first I ever drew.
At the bottom of the picture called “The Happy Duck” I had drawn a tiny house, and near the duck himself there was a large, kind woman who was calling him to her so that she might give him food.
“The Unhappy Duck,” on the other hand, was swimming about solitary and alone on a sort of hazy sea, which I had represented by drawing two or three straight lines, and in the distance one could see the outline of a gloomy shore. The thin paper, a leaf torn from a book, had print on the reverse side, and the letters showed through in grayish flecks and gave the curious impression as of clouds in the sky. And that little drawing, with less form than a school-boy's blackboard scrawl, was completely transfigured by those gray spots, and because of them it took on for me a deep and dreadful significance. Aided by the dim light in the room the pictured scene became a vision that faded away into the distance like the pale surface of the sea. I was terrified at my own work; I was astonished to find in it those things that I had not put there; to discover in it those things which elsewhere had given me such a well remembered anguish.
“Oh!” I said with exaltation to my young companion, who did not understand anything of what was going forward, “Oh!” I exclaimed with a voice full of emotion, “you may see it; I cannot bear to look at it!” I covered the picture with my hands, but nevertheless I peeped at it very often; and it was so vividly impressed upon my mind that I can still recall it as it appeared to me transfigured: a gleam of light lay upon the horizon of that sea so awkwardly represented, the heavens appeared to be filled with rain, and it seemed to be a dreary winter evening in which there was a fierce wind blowing.
The “Unhappy Duck” solitary, far away from his family and friends was making his way toward the foggy shore over which there hung an air of extreme sadness and desolation. And certainly for one fleeting moment I had a prescience of those heartaches that I was to know later in the course of my sailor life. I seemed to have a presentiment of those stormy December evenings when my boat was to enter, to take shelter until the morning, one of those uninhabited bays upon the coast of Brittany; more particularly I had a prescience of those twilights of the Antarctic winter when, in about the latitude of Magellan, we were to go in search of protection towards those sterile shores that are as inhospitable and as absolutely deserted as the waters surrounding them.
The vision faded and I once more found myself in my grandmother's large room enveloped in the shadows of the evening. My grandmother was singing, and I was again a tiny being who had seen nothing of the large world, who had fears without knowing wherefore, and who did not even know the cause of the tears that he shed.
Since then I have often observed that the rudimentary scrawls made by children, and which as representations are incorrect and inadequate, impress them much more than do the able and correct drawing of adults. For although theirs are incomplete they add to them a thousand things of their own seeing and imagining; and they add to them also the thousand things that grow in the deep subsoil of their consciousness—the things which no brush would be able to paint.
Upon the second floor, above the room occupied by my poor old grandmother, who sang the Marseillaise so constantly, in that part of the house overlooking the yard and the gardens, lived my great-aunt Bertha.
From her windows, across the houses and the walls covered with roses and jasmine, one could see the ramparts of the town. They were so near to us that their old trees were visible; and beyond them lay those great plains of our country called prees (prairies) all so alike, and as monotonous as the neighboring seas. From the window one also saw the river. At full tide, when it almost overflowed its banks, it looked, as it wound along through the green meadows, like silver lace; and the large and small boats that passed in the far distance mounted upon this silver thread toward the harbor and from there sailed out into the great sea.
As this was our only glimpse of real country the windows in my aunt Bertha's room had always a great attraction for me. Especially had they in the evening at sunset, for from them I could watch the sun sink mysteriously behind the prairies. Oh! those sunsets that I saw from my aunt Bertha's windows, what ecstasy overcast with melancholy they awakened in me! The winter sunsets seen through the closed windows were a pale rose color. Those of summer time, upon stormy evenings, after a hot, bright day, I contemplated from the open window, and as I did so I would breathe in the sweet odors given out by the jasmine blossoms growing on the wall: it seems to me that there are no such sunsets now as there were then. When the sunsets were notably splendid and unusual, if I was not in the room, aunt Bertha, who never missed one, would call out hastily: “Dearie! Dearie! Come quickly!” From any corner of the house I heard that call and understood it, and I went swift as a hurricane and mounted the stairs four steps at a time. I mounted the more rapidly because the stairway had already begun to fill with dread shadows; and in the turnings and corners I saw the imaginary forms of ghosts and monsters that at nightfall always pursued me as I ran up the stairs.
My aunt Bertha's room, with its simple white muslin curtains, was as modest as my grandmother's. The walls, covered with an old-fashioned paper in vogue at the commencement of the century, were ornamented with water colors similar to those in my grandmother's room. The picture that I looked at most often was a pastel after Raphael of a virgin in white, blue and rose color. The rays of the setting sun always fell upon this picture (I have already said the hour of sunset was the time I preferred most to be in this room). This virgin was very much like my aunt Bertha; in spite of the great difference in their ages, one was struck with the resemblance between the straight lines and regularity of their profiles.
On this same floor, but upon the street side, lived my other grandmother (the one who always dressed in black) and her daughter, my aunt Claire, the person in the house who petted me most.
Upon winter evenings, after I had been to my aunt Bertha's room to see the sunset, it was my custom to go to them. I usually found them together in my grandmother's room and I would seat myself near the fire in a little chair placed there for me. But the twilight hour spent with them was always a disturbing one. . . . After all the amusements, all the day's running and playing, to sit in the dusk almost motionless upon my tiny chair, with eyes wide open, uneasily watching for the least change in the shadows, especially on that side of the room where the door opened on the dim stairway, was very painful to me. . . . I am sure that if my grandmother and aunt had known of the melancholy and terrors which the twilight induced in me, they would have spared me by lighting the lamp, but they did not know my sufferings; and it was the custom of the aged persons by whom I was surrounded, to sit tranquilly at nightfall in their accustomed places without having need for a lighted lamp. As it grew darker one or the other, grandmother or aunt, would draw her chair closer to me, and when I had that protection about me I felt completely happy and reassured and would say: “Please tell me stories about the Island.”
The Island, that is the Island of Oleron, was my mother's native place, my grandmother's and aunt's also, which they had quitted twenty years before my birth to establish themselves upon the main land. The Island, or the least thing that came from it, had a singular charm for me.
It was quite near us, for from a garret window at the top of the house we could, upon a very clear day, see the extreme end of its extensive plain; it appeared a little bluish line against a still paler one which was the arm of the ocean separating us from it. . . . To get to it we had to take a long journey in wretched country wagons and in sailing boats; and often our boat had to make its way there in the teeth of a strong gale. At this time in the village of St. Pierre Oleron I had three old aunts who lived very modestly upon the revenues of their salt marshes (the remains of a once great inheritance), and their annual rents which the peasants still paid with sacks of wheat. . . . When I went to visit them at St. Pierre there was for me a certain joy, mingled with many kinds of conflicting emotions, which I cannot explain, in trying to picture to myself their once great station.
The Huguenot austerity of their manners, their mode of life, their house and their furniture all belonged to a past time, to a bygone generation. The sea surrounded and isolated us, and the wind constantly swept over the moorland and over the great stretches of sandy beach.
My nurse was also from the Island, of a Huguenot family, which descending from father to son had been with us for a long time; and she would say: “At home, on the Island,” in such a way that with a wave of emotion I understood her great homesickness for it.
We had about us a number of little articles that had come from there, and which had places of honor in our home. We had some black pebbles large as cannon-balls, that had been chosen from the thousands lying on the Long-Beach because centuries of washing had polished and rounded them exquisitely. These pebbles always played an important part every winter evening, for with the greatest regularity the old people would put them into the chimney-place where a wood fire blazed and crackled; afterwards they slipped them into calico bags of a flowered pattern, also brought from the Island, and took them to bed where they served to keep their feet warm during the night.
In our cellar we had wooden props and firkins, and also a number of straight elm poles for holding the washing which had been cut from the choicest young trees in my grandmother's forest. I had the greatest veneration for all these things. I knew that my grandmother no longer owned the forests, nor the salt marshes, nor the vineyards; for I had heard them say that she had sold them one at a time to put the money into investments upon the mainland; and that an incompetent notary by his bad investments had greatly reduced her income.
When I went to the Island and the old salt makers and vine dressers, who had at one time worked for our family, still loyal and respectful called me “our little master,” I knew they did so out of pure politeness and altogether in deference to our past grandeur.
I regretted that I could not spend my life in tending the vineyards and the harvests, the occupations of several of my ancestors. Such a life seemed a much more desirable one to me than my own which was passed in a house in town.
The stories of the Island that my grandmother and aunt Claire related to me were generally of the happenings of their own childhood, a childhood that seemed so very far away that to me it had no more reality than a dream.
There were stories of grandfathers, long dead; of great-uncles whom I had never known, dead also for many years. When my aunt told me their names and described them to me I would abandon myself to reverie. There was in particular a grandfather Samuel who had preached at the time of the religious persecution, whom I thought an extraordinarily interesting person.
I did not care whether the stories were different or not, and I would ask for the same ones over and over. Often they told me stories of journeys they had taken on the little donkeys that played such an important part in the lives of the people of St. Pierre. They would ride upon them to visit distant properties and vineyards; to get to these it was often necessary to travel along the sands of the Long-Beach, and sometimes of an evening during these expeditions terrible storms would burst upon the travellers and compel them to take shelter for the night in the inns and farmhouses.
And as I sat in the darkness that no longer had terrors for me, my imagination busy with the things and peoples of other days, tinkle, tinkle would go the dinner bell; then I rose and jumped for joy, and we would go down to the dining-room together and find all the family gathered there in the bright gay room: then I would run to my mother and in an excess of emotion hide my face in her dress.
Gaspard was a little crop-eared dog who was saved from absolute homeliness by the vivacious and kindly expression of his eyes. I do not now recall how he came to domesticate himself with us, but I do know that I loved him very tenderly.
One winter afternoon, when he and I were out for a walk, he ran away from me. I consoled myself, however, by saying that he would certainly return to the house alone, and I went home in a happy frame of mind. But when night came and he was still absent I grew very heavy of heart.
My parents had at dinner that evening an accomplished violinist and they had given me permission to remain up later than usual so that I might hear him. The first sweep of his bow which preluded I know not what slow and desolate movement, sounded to me like an invocation to those dark woodland paths in which, in the deeps of night, one feels that he is lost and abandoned; as the musician played I had a vision of Gaspard mistaking his way at the cross-roads because of the rain, and I saw him take an unfamiliar path that led forever away from friends and home. Then my tears began to flow, but no one perceived them; and as I wept the violin continued to fill the silence with its sad wailing, and it seemed to get a response from bottomless abysses inhabited by phantoms to which I could give neither a form nor name.
That was my introduction to reverie awaking music, and years passed before I again experienced such sensations, for the little piano pieces that I began to play for myself soon after this (in a remarkable way for a child of my age they said) sounded to me only like sweet, rhythmical noise.
I wish now to speak of the anguish caused by a story that was read to me. (I seldom read for myself, and in fact I disliked books very much.)
A very disobedient little boy who had run away from his family and his native land, years later, after the death of his parents and his sister, returned alone to visit his parental home. This took place in November, and naturally the author described the dull gray sky and spoke of the bleak wind that blew the few remaining leaves from the trees.
In a deserted garden, in an arbor stripped of all its green, the prodigal son in stooping down found among the autumn leaves a bluish bead that had lain there since the time he had played in the bower with his sister.
Oh! at that point I begged them to cease reading, for I felt the sobs coming. I could see, see vividly, that solitary garden, that leafless old arbor, and half-hidden under the reddish leaves I saw that blue bead, souvenir of the dead sister. . . . It depressed me dreadfully and gave me a conception of that inevitable fading away of everything and every one, of the great universal change that comes to all.
It is strange that my tenderly guarded infancy should have been so full of sad emotions and morbid reflections.
I am sure that the sad days and happenings were rare, and that I lived the joyous and careless life of other children; but just because the happy days were so habitual to me they made no impression upon my mind, and I can no longer recall them.
My memories of the summer time are so similar that they break with the splendor of the sun into the dark places and things of my mind.
And always the great heat, the deep blue skies, the sparkling sand of the beach and the flood of light upon the white lime walls of the cottages of the little villages upon the “Island” induced in me a melancholy and sleepiness which I afterwards experienced with even greater intensity in the land of the Turk.
“And at midnight there was a cry made: Behold, the Bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him. . . . And they that were ready went in with him to the marriage; and the door was shut. Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us.
“But he answered and said, Verily, I say unto you, I know you not.
“Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.”
After reading these verses in a loud voice, my father closed the Bible; in the room where we were assembled there was a sound of chairs being moved and we all went down upon our knees to pray. Following the usage in old Huguenot families, it was our custom to have prayers just before retiring to our rooms for the night.
“And the door was shut. . . .” Although I still knelt I no longer heard the prayer, for the foolish virgins appeared to me. They were enveloped in white veils that billowed about them as they stood before the door holding in their hands the little lamps whose flickering flames were so soon to be extinguished, leaving them in the gloom without before that closed door, closed against them irrevocably and forever. . . . And a time could come then when it would be too late; when the Saviour weary of our trespassing would no longer listen to our supplications! I had never thought that that was possible. And a fear more terrifying and awful than any I had ever known before completely overwhelmed me at the thought of eternal damnation. . . .
For a long time, for many weeks and months, the parable of the foolish virgins haunted me. And every evening, when darkness came, I would repeat to myself the words that sounded so beautiful and yet so dismaying: “Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.” If he should come to-night, was ever my thought, I would be awakened by a noise as of the sound of rushing waters, by the blare of the trumpet of the angel of the Lord announcing the terrifying approach of the end of the world. And I could never go to sleep until I had said a long prayer in which I commended myself to the mercy of my Saviour.
I do not believe there was ever a little child who had a more sensitive conscience than I; about everything I was so morbidly scrupulous that I was often misunderstood by those who loved me best, a thing that caused me the most poignant heartaches. I remember having been tormented for days merely because in relating something I had not reported it precisely as it had happened. And to such a point did I carry my squeamishness of conscience that when I had finished with my recital or statement I would murmur in a low voice, in the tone of one who tells over his beads, these words: “After all, perhaps I do not remember just exactly how it was.” When I think of the thousand remorses and fears which my trifling wrong doings caused me, and which from my sixth to my eighth year cast a gloom over my childhood, I feel a sort of retrospective depression.
At that period if any one asked me what I hoped to be in the future, when a man, without hesitation I would answer: “I expect to be a minister,”—and to me the religious vocation seemed the very grandest one. And those about me would smile and without doubt they thought, inasmuch as I too wished it, that it was the best career for me.
In the evening, especially at night, I meditated constantly of that hereafter which to pronounce the name of filled me with terror: eternity. And my departure from this earth,—this earth which I had scarcely seen, of which I had seen no more than the tiniest and most colorless corner—seemed to me a thing very near at hand. With a blending of impatience and mortal fear I thought of myself as soon to be clothed in a resplendent white robe, as soon to be seated in a great splendor of light among the multitude of angels and chosen ones around the throne of the Blessed Lamb; I saw myself in the midst of a great moving orb that, to the sound of music, oscillated slowly and continuously in the infinite void of heaven.
“Once upon a time a little girl when she opened a large fruit that had come from the colonies, a big creature came out of it, a green creature, and it bit her and that made her die.”
It was my little friend Antoinette (she was six and I seven) who was telling me the story which had been suggested to her because we were about to break and divide an apricot between us. We were at the extreme end of her garden in the lovely month of June under a branching apricot tree. We sat very close together upon the same stool in a house about as big as a bee-hive, which we had built for our exclusive use out of old planks. Our dwelling was covered with pieces of foreign matting that had come from the Antilles packed about some boxes of coffee. The sunbeams pierced the roof, which was of a coarse straw-colored material, and the warm breeze that stirred the leaves of the trees about us made the sunlight dance as it fell upon our faces and aprons. (During at least two summers it had been our favorite amusement to build, in isolated nooks, houses like the one described in Robinson Crusoe, and thus hidden away we would sit together and chat.) In the story of the little girl who was bitten by the big creature this phrase, “a very large fruit from the colonies,” had suddenly plunged me into a reverie. And I had a vision of trees, of strange fruits, and of forests filled with marvelously colored birds. Ah! how much those magical but disturbing words, “the colonies” conveyed to me in my childhood. To me they meant at that time all tropical and distant countries, which I invariably thought of as filled with giant palms, exquisite flowers, strange black people and great animals. Although my ideas were so confused I had an almost true conception, amounting to an intuition, of their mournful splendor and their enervating melancholy.
I think that I saw a palm for the first time in an illustrated book called the “Young Naturalists,” by Madame Ulliac-Tremadeure; the book was one of my New Year's gifts, and I read some parts of it upon New Year's evening. (Green-house palms had not at that time been brought to our little town.)
The illustrator had placed two of these unfamiliar trees at the edge of a sea-shore along which negroes were passing. Recently I was curious enough to hunt in the little yellow, faded book for that picture, and truly I wonder how that illustration had the power to create the very least of my dreams unless it were that my immature mind was already leavened by the memory of memories.
“The colonies!” Ah! how can I give an adequate idea of all that awoke in my mind at the sound of these words? A fruit from there, a bird or a shell, had instantly the greatest charm for me.
There were a number of things from the tropics in little Antoinette's home: a parrot, birds of many colors in a cage, and collections of shells and insects. In one of her mamma's bureau drawers I had seen quaint necklaces of fragrant berries; in the garret, where we sometimes rummaged, we found skins of animals and peculiar bags and cases upon which could still be made out the names of towns in the Antilles; and a faint tropical odor scented the entire house.
Antoinette's garden, as I have said, was separated from ours by a very low wall overgrown with roses and jasmine. And the very old pomegranate tree growing there spread its branches into our yard, and at the blooming season its coral-red petals were scattered upon our grass.
Often we spoke from one house to the other:
“Can I come over and play with you?” I would ask. “Will your mamma allow me?”
“No, because I have been naughty and I am being punished.” (That happened very often.)—Such an answer always grieved me a great deal; but I must confess that it was more on account of my disappointment over the parrot and the tropical things than because of her punishment.
Little Antoinette had been born in the colonies, but, curiously enough, she never seemed to value that fact, and they had very little charm for her, indeed she scarcely remembered them. I would have given everything I possessed in the world to have seen, if only for the briefest time, one of those distant countries, inaccessible to me, as I well knew.
With a regret that was almost anguish I thought, alas! that in my life as minister, live as long as I might, I would never, never see those enchanting lands.
I will now describe a game that gave Antoinette and me the greatest pleasure during those two delicious summers.
We pretended to be two caterpillars, and we would creep along the ground upon our stomachs and our knees and hunt for leaves to eat. After having done that for some time we played that we were very very sleepy, and we would lie down in a corner under the trees and cover our heads with our white aprons—we had become cocoons. We remained in this condition for some time, and so thoroughly did we enter into the role of insects in a state of metamorphosis, that any one listening would have heard pass between us, in a tone of the utmost seriousness, conversations of this nature:
“Do you think that you will soon be able to fly?”
“Oh yes! I'll be flying very soon; I feel them growing in my shoulders now . . . they'll soon unfold.” (“They” naturally referred to wings.)
Finally we would wake up, stretch ourselves, and without saying anything we conveyed by our manner our astonishment at the great transformation in our condition. . . .
Then suddenly we began to run lightly and very nimbly in our tiny shoes; in our hands we held the corners of our pinafores which we waved as if they were wings; we ran and ran, and chased each other, and flew about making sharp and fantastic curves as we went. We hastened from flower to flower and smelled all of them, and we continually imitated the restlessness of giddy moths; we imagined too that we were imitating their buzzing when we exclaimed: “Hou ou ou!” a noise we made by filling the cheeks with air and puffing it out quickly through the half-closed mouth.
The butterflies, the poor butterflies that have gone out of fashion in these days, played, I am ashamed to say, a large part in my life during my childhood, as did also the flies, beetles and lady-bugs and all the insects that are found upon flowers and in the grass. Although it gave me a great deal of pain to kill them, I was making a collection of them, and I was almost always seen with a butterfly net in my hand. Those flying about in our yard, that had strayed our way from the country, were not very beautiful it must be confessed, but I had the garden and woods of Limoise which all the summer long was a hunting-ground ever full of surprises and wonders.
But the caricatures by Topffer upon this subject made me thoughtful; and when Lucette one day caught me with several butterflies in my hat, and in her incomparably mocking voice called me, “Mr. Cryptogram,” I was much humiliated.