... My friend Felicien had come to the colony fresh from the region of
the Vosges, with the muscles and energies of a mountaineer, and cheeks
pink as a French country-girl's;--he had never seemed to me physically
adapted for acclimation; and I feared much for him on hearing of his
first serious illness. Then the news of his convalescence came to me as
a grateful surprise. But I did not feel reassured by his appearance the
first evening I called at the little house to which he had been removed,
on the brow of a green height overlooking the town. I found him seated
in a _berceuse_ on the veranda. How wan he was, and how spectral his
smile of welcome,--as he held out to me a hand that seemed all of bone!
... We chatted there a while. It had been one of those tropic days whose
charm interpenetrates and blends with all the subtler life of sensation,
and becomes a luminous part of it forever,--steeping all after-dreams
of ideal peace in supernal glory of color,--transfiguring all fancies of
the pure joy of being. Azure to the sea-line the sky had remained since
morning; and the trade-wind, warm as a caress, never brought even one
gauzy cloud to veil the naked beauty of the peaks.
And the sun was yellowing,--as only over the tropics he yellows to
his death. Lilac tones slowly spread through sea and heaven from the
west;--mornes facing the light began to take wondrous glowing color,--a
tone of green so fiery that it looked as though all the rich sap of
their woods were phosphorescing. Shadows blued;--far peaks took
tinting that scarcely seemed of earth,--iridescent violets and
purples interchanging through vapor of gold.... Such the colors of the
_carangue_, when the beautiful tropic fish is turned in the light, and
its gem-greens shift to rich azure and prism-purple.
Reclining in our chairs, we watched the strange splendor from the
veranda of the little cottage,--saw the peaked land slowly steep itself
in the aureate glow,--the changing color of the verdured mornes, and of
the sweep of circling sea. Tiny birds, bosomed with fire, were shooting
by in long curves, like embers flung by invisible hands. From far below,
the murmur of the city rose to us,--a stormy hum. So motionless we
remained that the green and gray lizards were putting out their heads
from behind the columns of the veranda to stare at us,--as if wondering
whether we were really alive. I turned my head suddenly to look at
two queer butterflies; and all the lizards hid themselves again.
_Papillon-lanmò_,--Death's butterflies,--these were called in the speech
of the people: their broad wings were black like blackest velvet;--as
they fluttered against the yellow light, they looked like silhouettes of
butterflies. Always through my memory of that wondrous evening,--when I
little thought I was seeing my friend's face for the last time,--there
slowly passes the black palpitation of those wings....
... I had been chatting with Felicien about various things which I
thought might have a cheerful interest for him; and more than once I
had been happy to see him smile.... But our converse waned.
The ever-magnifying splendor before us had been mesmerizing our
senses,--slowly overpowering our wills with the amazement of its beauty.
Then, as the sun's disk--enormous,--blinding gold--touched the lilac
flood, and the stupendous orange glow flamed up to the very zenith, we
found ourselyes awed at last into silence.
The orange in the west deepened into vermilion. Softly and very swiftly
night rose like an indigo exhalation from the land,--filling the
valleys, flooding the gorges, blackening the woods, leaving only the
points of the peaks a while to catch the crimson glow. Forests
and fields began to utter a rushing sound as of torrents, always
deepening,--made up of the instrumentation and the voices of numberless
little beings: clangings as of hammered iron, ringings as of dropping
silver upon a stone, the dry bleatings of the _cabritt-bois_, and the
chirruping of tree-frogs, and the _k-i-i-i-i-i-i_ of crickets. Immense
trembling sparks began to rise and fall among the shadows,--twinkling
out and disappearing all mysteriously: these were the fire-flies
awakening. Then about the branches of the _bois-canon_ black shapes
began to hover, which were not birds--shapes flitting processionally
without any noise; each one in turn resting a moment as to nibble
something at the end of a bough;--then yielding place to another, and
circling away, to return again from the other side...the _guimbos_, the
great bats.
But we were silent, with the emotion of sunset still upon us: that
ghostly emotion which is the transmitted experience of a race,--the sum
of ancestral experiences innumerable,--the mingled joy and pain
of a million years.... Suddenly a sweet voice pierced the
stillness,--pleading:--
--"_Pa combiné, chè!--pa combiné conm ça!_" (Do not think, dear!--do not
think like that!)
... Only less beautiful than the sunset she seemed, this slender
half-breed, who had come all unperceived behind us, treading soundlessly
with her slim bare feet.... "And you, Missié", she said to me, in a tone
of gentle reproach;--"you are his friend! why do you let him think? It
is thinking that will prevent him getting well."
_Combiné_ in creole signifies to think intently, and therefore to be
unhappy,--because, with this artless race, as with children, to
think intensely about anything is possible only under great stress of
suffering.
--"_Pa combiné,--non, chè_," she repeated, plaintively, stroking
Felicien's hair. "It is thinking that makes us old.... And it is time to
bid your friend good-night."...
--"She is so good," said Felicien, smiling to make her pleased;--"I
could never tell you how good. But she does not understand. She believes
I suffer if I am silent. She is contented only when she sees me laugh;
and so she will tell me creole stories by the hour to keep me amused, as
if I were a child."...
As he spoke she slipped an arm about his neck.
--"_Doudoux_," she persisted;--and her voice was a dove's coo,--"_Si ou
ainmein moin, pa combiné-non!_"
And in her strange exotic beauty, her savage grace, her supple caress,
the velvet witchery of her eyes,--it seemed to me that I beheld a
something imaged, not of herself, nor of the moment only,--a something
weirdly sensuous: the Spirit of tropic Nature made golden flesh, and
murmuring to each lured wanderer:--"_If thou wouldst love me, do not
think_"...
[Illustration]