Then only the enormous double-vision of sky and sea.
The sky: a cupola of blinding blue, shading down and paling into
spectral green at the rim of the world,--and all fleckless, save at
evening. Then, with sunset, comes a light gold-drift of little feathery
cloudlets into the West,--stippling it as with a snow of fire.
The sea: no flower-tint may now make my comparison for the splendor of
its lucent color. It has shifted its hue;--for we have entered into the
Azure Stream: it has more than the magnificence of burning cyanogen....
But, at night, the Cross of the South appears no more. And other changes
come, as day succeeds to day,--a lengthening of the hours of light, a
longer lingering of the after-glow,--a cooling of the wind. Each morning
the air seems a little cooler, a little rarer;--each noon the sky looks
a little paler, a little further away--always heightening, yet also
more shadowy, as if its color, receding, were dimmed by distance,--were
coming more faintly down from vaster altitudes.
... Mademoiselle is petted like a child by the lady passengers. And
every man seems anxious to aid in making her voyage a pleasant one. For
much of which, I think, she may thank her eyes!
X
A dim morning and chill;--blank sky and sunless waters: the sombre
heaven of the North with colorless horizon rounding in a blind grey
sea.... What a sudden weight comes to the heart with the touch of the
cold mist, with the spectral melancholy of the dawn;--and then what
foolish though irrepressible yearning for the vanished azure left
behind!
... The little monkeys twitter plaintively, trembling in the chilly air.
The parrots have nothing to say: they look benumbed, and sit on their
perches with eyes closed.
... A vagueness begins to shape itself along the verge of the sea, far
to port: that long heavy clouding which indicates the approach of land.
And from it now floats to us something ghostly and frigid which makes
the light filmy and the sea shadowy as a flood of dreams,--the fog of
the Jersey coast.
At once the engines slacken their respiration. The _Guadeloupe_ begins
to utter her steam-cry of warning,--regularly at intervals of two
minutes,--for she is now in the track of all the ocean vessels. And
from far away we can hear a heavy knelling,--the booming of some great
fog-bell.
... All in a white twilight. The place of the horizon has vanished;--we
seem ringed in by a wall of smoke.... Out of this vapory emptiness--very
suddenly--an enormous steamer rushes, towering like a hill--passes
so close that we can see faces, and disappears again, leaving the sea
heaving and frothing behind her.
... As I lean over the rail to watch the swirling of the wake, I feel
something pulling at my sleeve: a hand,--a tiny black hand,--the hand of
a _sakiwinki_. One of the little monkeys, straining to the full length
of his string, is making this dumb appeal for human sympathy;--the
bird-black eyes of both are fixed upon me with the oddest look of
pleading. Poor little tropical exiles! I stoop to caress them; but
regret the impulse a moment later: they utter such beseeching cries when
I find myself obliged to leave them again alone!...
... Hour after hour the _Guadeloupe_ glides on through the white
gloom,--cautiously, as if feeling her way; always sounding her whistle,
ringing her bells, until at last some brown-winged bark comes flitting
to us out of the mist, bearing a pilot.... How strange it must all seem
to Mademoiselle who stands so silent there at the rail!--how weird this
veiled world must appear to her, after the sapphire light of her own
West Indian sky, and the great lazulite splendor of her own tropic sea!
But a wind comes;--it strengthens,--begins to blow very cold. The mists
thin before its blowing; and the wan blank sky is all revealed again
with livid horizon around the heaving of the iron-grey sea.
... Thou dim and lofty heaven of the North,--grey sky of Odin,--bitter
thy winds and spectral all thy colors!--they that dwell beneath thee
know not the glory of Eternal Summer's green,--the azure splendor of
southern day!--but thine are the lightnings of Thought illuminating for
human eyes the interspaces between sun and sun. Thine the generations
of might,--the strivers, the battlers,--the men who make Nature
tame!--thine the domain of inspiration and achievement,--the larger
heroisms, the vaster labors that endure, the higher knowledge, and all
the witchcrafts of science!...
But in each one of us there lives a mysterious Something which is Self,
yet also infinitely more than Self,--incomprehensibly multiple,--the
complex total of sensations, impulses, timidities belonging to the
unknown past. And the lips of the little stranger from the tropics have
become all white, because that Something within her,--ghostly bequest
from generations who loved the light and rest and wondrous color of a
more radiant world,--now shrinks all back about her girl's heart
with fear of this pale grim North.... And lo!--opening mile-wide in
dream-grey majesty before us,--reaching away, through measureless mazes
of masting, into remotenesses all vapor-veiled,--the mighty perspective
of New York harbor!...
Thou knowest it not, this gloom about us, little maiden;--'tis only
a magical dusk we are entering,--only that mystic dimness in which
miracles must be wrought!... See the marvellous shapes uprising,--the
immensities, the astonishments! And other greater wonders thou wilt
behold in a little while, when we shall have become lost to each other
forever in the surging of the City's million-hearted life!... 'Tis all
shadow here, thou sayest?--Ay, 'tis twilight, verily, by contrast
with that glory out of which thou camest, Lys--twilight only,--but the
Twilight of the Gods!... _Adié, chè!--Bon-Dié ké bént ou!_...