Hours, days, and weeks began to pass. Sailors assert that sometimes
when the sea is greatly roused, something from out the midst of night
and darkness calls them by name. If the infinity of the sea may call
out thus, perhaps when a man is growing old, calls come to him, too,
from another infinity still darker and more deeply mysterious; and the
more he is wearied by life the dearer are those calls to him. But to
hear them quiet is needed. Besides old age loves to put itself aside as
if with a foreboding of the grave. The light-house had become for
Skavinski such a half grave. Nothing is more monotonous than life on a
beacon-tower. If young people consent to take up this service they
leave it after a time. Light-house keepers are generally men not young,
gloomy, and confined to themselves. If by chance one of them leaves his
light-house and goes among men, he walks in the midst of them like a
person roused from deep slumber. On the tower there is a lack of minute
impressions which in ordinary life teach men to adapt themselves to
everything. All that a light-house keeper comes in contact with is
gigantic, and devoid of definitely outlined forms. The sky is one
whole, the water another; and between those two infinities the soul of
man is in loneliness. That is a life in which thought is continual
meditation, and out of that meditation nothing rouses the keeper, not
even his work. Day is like day as two beads in a rosary, unless changes
of weather form the only variety. But Skavinski felt more happiness
than ever in life before. He rose with the dawn, took his breakfast,
polished the lens, and then sitting on the balcony gazed into the
distance of the water; and his eyes were never sated with the pictures
which he saw before him. On the enormous turquoise ground of the ocean
were to be seen generally flocks of swollen sails gleaming in the rays
of the sun so brightly that the eyes were blinking before the excess of
light. Sometimes the ships, favored by the so-called trade winds, went
in an extended line one after another, like a chain of sea-mews or
albatrosses. The red casks indicating the channel swayed on the light
wave with gentle movement. Among the sails appeared every afternoon
gigantic grayish feather-like plumes of smoke. That was a steamer from
New York which brought passengers and goods to Aspinwall, drawing
behind it a frothy path of foam. On the other side of the balcony
Skavinski saw, as if on his palm, Aspinwall and its busy harbor, and in
it a forest of masts, boats, and craft; a little farther, white houses
and the towers of the town. From the height of his tower the small
houses were like the nests of sea-mews, the boats were like beetles,
and the people moved around like small points on the white stone
boulevard. From early morning a light eastern breeze brought a confused
hum of human life, above which predominated the whistle of steamers. In
the afternoon six o'clock came; the movement in the harbor began to
cease; the mews hid themselves in the rents of the cliffs; the waves
grew feeble and became in some sort lazy; and then on the land, on the
sea, and on the tower came a time of stillness unbroken by anything.
The yellow sands from which the waves had fallen back glittered like
golden stripes on the width of the waters; the body of the tower was
outlined definitely in blue. Floods of sunbeams were poured from the
sky on the water and the sands and the cliff. At that time a certain
lassitude full of sweetness seized the old man. He felt that the rest
which he was enjoying was excellent; and when he thought that it would
be continuous nothing was lacking to him.
Skavinski was intoxicated with his own happiness; and since a man
adapts himself easily to improved conditions, he gained faith and
confidence by degrees; for he thought that if men built houses for
invalids, why should not God gather up at last His own invalids? Time
passed, and confirmed him in this conviction. The old man grew
accustomed to his tower, to the lantern, to the rock, to the sand-bars,
to solitude. He grew accustomed also to the sea-mews which hatched in
the crevices of the rock, and in the evening held meetings on the roof
of the light-house. Skavinski threw to them generally the remnants of
his food; and soon they grew tame, and afterward, when he fed them, a
real storm of white wings encircled him, and the old man went among the
birds like a shepherd among sheep. When the tide ebbed he went to the
low sand-banks, on which he collected savory periwinkles and beautiful
pearl shells of the nautilus, which receding waves had left on the
sand. In the night by the moonlight and the tower he went to catch
fish, which frequented the windings of the cliff in myriads. At last he
was in love with his rocks and his treeless little island, grown over
only with small thick plants exuding sticky resin. The distant views
repaid him for the poverty of the island, however. During afternoon
hours, when the air became very clear he could see the whole isthmus
covered with the richest vegetation. It seemed to Skavinski at such
times that he saw one gigantic garden,--bunches of cocoa, and enormous
musa, combined as it were in luxurious tufted bouquets, right there
behind the houses of Aspinwall. Farther on, between Aspinwall and
Panama, was a great forest over which every morning and evening hung a
reddish haze of exhalations,--a real tropical forest with its feet in
stagnant water, interlaced with lianas and filled with the sound of one
sea of gigantic orchids, palms, milk-trees, iron-trees, gum-trees.
Through his field-glass the old man could see not only trees and the
broad leaves of bananas, but even legions of monkeys and great marabous
and flocks of parrots, rising at times like a rainbow cloud over the
forest. Skavinski knew such forests well, for after being wrecked on
the Amazon he had wandered whole weeks among similar arches and
thickets. He had seen how many dangers and deaths lie concealed under
those wonderful and smiling exteriors. During the nights which he had
spent in them he heard close at hand the sepulchral voices of howling
monkeys and the roaring of the jaguars; he saw gigantic serpents coiled
like lianas on trees; he knew those slumbering forest lakes full of
torpedo-fish and swarming with crocodiles; he knew under what a yoke
man lives in those unexplored wildernesses in which are single leaves
that exceed a man's size ten times,--wildernesses swarming with
blood-drinking mosquitoes, tree-leeches, and gigantic poisonous
spiders. He had experienced that forest life himself, had witnessed it,
had passed through it; therefore it gave him the greater enjoyment to
look from his height and gaze on those matos, admire their beauty, and
be guarded from their treacherousness. His tower preserved him from
every evil. He left it only for a few hours on Sunday. He put on then
his blue keeper's coat with silver buttons, and hung his crosses on his
breast. His milk-white head was raised with a certain pride when he
heard at the door, while entering the church, the Creoles say among
themselves, "We have an honorable light-house keeper and not a heretic,
though he is a Yankee." But he returned straightway after Mass to his
island, and returned happy, for he had still no faith in the mainland.
On Sunday also he read the Spanish newspaper which he brought in the
town, or the New York Herald, which he borrowed from Falconbridge; and
he sought in it European news eagerly. The poor old heart on that
light-house tower, and in another hemisphere, was beating yet for its
birthplace. At times too, when the boat brought his daily supplies and
water to the island, he went down from the tower to talk with Johnson,
the guard. But after a while he seemed to grow shy. He ceased to go to
the town to read the papers and to go down to talk politics with
Johnson. Whole weeks passed in this way, so that no one saw him and he
saw no one. The only signs that the old man was living were the
disappearance of the provisions left on shore, and the light of the
lantern kindled every evening with the same regularity with which the
sun rose in the morning from the waters of those regions. Evidently,
the old man had become indifferent to the world. Homesickness was not
the cause, but just this,--that even homesickness had passed into
resignation. The whole world began now and ended for Skavinski on his
island. He had grown accustomed to the thought that he would not leave
the tower till his death, and he simply forgot that there was anything
else besides it. Moreover, he had become a mystic; his mild blue eyes
began to stare like the eyes of a child, and were as if fixed on
something at a distance. In presence of a surrounding uncommonly simple
and great, the old man was losing the feeling of personality; he was
ceasing to exist as an individual, was becoming merged more and more in
that which inclosed him. He did not understand anything beyond his
environment; he felt only unconsciously. At last it seems to him that
the heavens, the water, his rock, the tower, the golden sand-banks, and
the swollen sails, the sea-mews, the ebb and flow of the tide,--all
form a mighty unity, one enormous mysterious soul; that he is sinking
in that mystery, and feels that soul which lives and lulls itself. He
sinks and is rocked, forgets himself; and in that narrowing of his own
individual existence, in that half-waking, half-sleeping, he has
discovered a rest so great that it nearly resembles half-death.