There is much in Montreal that takes me back into the dim mists--the
wonderful days when I had lived only three years. It was not here,
but farther west--still what is in Canada is Canadian and does
not change nor vary. This Canadian land and water and air awakens
shadow-things in my memory and visions and voices of the world as
it was when I was three.
It is all exceeding fair to look upon about here. The fields are
green, not as they are in Massachusetts, but as they might be in the
south of France. There is a beautiful, broad, blue river that can
be seen from far off, and it sends out a haze and then all is gray
French country, and gray French villages. When you come near you
see the French peasants working in the fields--old men and maidens,
and very old, strange-looking women, all with no English words in
their mouths and no English thing in their lives if they can avoid
it. They wear brass rings on their hands and in their ears, and
the women wear gay-colored fish-wife petticoats, and in all their
faces and eyes is that look that comes from working always among
vegetables in the sun, the look of a piteous, useless brain.
And there is the strange, long, tree-covered hill that they call
Mount Royal. I have in my mind a picture of it in a bygone century,
when an adventurous, brave Frenchman and a few Indians of the wild
stood high at its summit--he with the French flag unfurled in
the wind, and the Indians shading their eyes and looking off and
down into the valley. And there was not one sign of human life in
the valley, and all was wild growth and tangled underbrush, and
death-like silence, except maybe for the far-off sound of flying
wild hoofs in the forest. And now this hill is the lodging-place of
many things hidden among the trees--convents set about with tall,
thick, solid stone walls, and inside the walls are heavy-swathed
nuns who have said their farewell to all things without. And there
are hospitals founded and endowed in the name of the Virgin, and
Jesuit colleges, and the lodges of priests and brotherhoods.
And in the midst of the St. Lawrence valley where the Indians looked
down is this old gray-stone city, and in the Place d’Armes square
is a fine triumphant statue of Maisonneuve with his French flag.
This gray-stone city is builded thick with gray-stone cathedrals,
and some of them are very fine, and some of them are parti-colored
as rainbows inside, and all of them are Roman Catholic and French.
The Protestant churches are but churches.
And the Notre Dame cathedral, when the setting sun touches its
great, tall, gray, twin towers with red, is even more than French
and Roman Catholic. The white-faced women in the nunnery at the side
of it must need have a likeness of those eternal towers graven on
their narrow devout hearts. Within, the Notre Dame is most gorgeous
with brilliant-colored saints and Virgins and a passion of wealth
and Romanism.
And is it not wonderful to think that many of these gray-stone
buildings and dwellings were here in the sixteen hundreds, and that
gray nuns walked in these same green gardens two centuries ago?
And the same country was about here, and the same blue water.
And when all is said, the country and the blue water have been here
always, and are the most wonderful things of all. If the gray-stone
buildings were of yellow gold and of emeralds and brilliants, the
green country would be no fairer and no less exquisitely fair, and
the blue of the water would go no deeper into the heart and no less
deep, and the pale clouds would float high and gently with the same
old-time mystery. And the centuries they know are countless.
The natural things are the same in Massachusetts--but here they
seem someway even older. You feel the breath of the very long-ago
among the wildness of green--as if only human beings had come and
gone, but it had never changed its smallest twig or grass-blade.
It seems but waiting, and its patience in the waiting is without
end.
Away on the other side of the tree-covered mountain I have seen a
flat, gently-curved, country road with the sunshine upon it and
a few little English sparrows alighting and flying along it and
picking at grains. And the grass by the road-side was tall and rank
and sweet to the senses, and the road led to farms and the river
and the wildwood. Cows were feeding by a shallow brook, and there
were sumach bushes, thick and dark, near by.
For several minutes when my eyes rested upon this I felt absolutely
content with all of life.
While I’m telling you this, Annabel Lee, I am not quite sure you are
listening--and for myself, I see _you_ much more than anything I
have talked about. I am wondering how it is possible that you have
lived only fourteen years--even the fourteen years of a Japanese
woman. And I see again in my mind--your red lips, and your dead-black
hair, and your purple eyes, and your wonderful hands, and your
forehead with the widow’s peak, and the two short side-locks that
curve around, and your slimness in the scarlet and gold-embroidered
gown.
And most of all I see your eyes when they are full of soft purple
shadows, and your lips when they are tender--and your heart, as I
have seen it before, and its depths which are of the white purity.
Last night there was the vision of you with your purple eyes wide and
gazing down at me with the white lids still. And I was horror-struck
at the look of world-weariness in them--how that it is terrible,
how that it follows one into the darkness and light, how that it is
grief and rage and madness, how that it makes the heart ache until
all the life-nerves ache with it--and there is no end; how that it
is life and death, and one can not escape!--a world of tears and
entreating and vows; but no, there is no escape.
And then again I looked up at your purple eyes gazing down at me
full of strong, high scorn and triumph. “Do you think we have not
conquered life?” they said. “Do you think we can not crush out all
the little demons that presume to torture? Do you think we can not
conquer _everything_? Who is there that we have not known? Where
is there that we have not been? Are there any still, still shadows
that we have cringed before? Are there any brilliant lights upon the
sky that we have not faced boldly and put aside? And the stones and
the stars and the mists on the sea are less--less than we,--_we_
are the greatest things of all.”
Thus your two eyes when I slept, and when I woke I saw you again as
you have looked so many times--the expression of your red lips, and
your voice with vague bitterness, and your lily face inscrutable.