The blue-green sea is living velvet, and full of light-rings; it
goes out to a distant mauve horizon, near which sea-gulls with white
gleaming wings are flying. Many gulls are fluttering on the red buoys
in the water.
It is late in a December afternoon on the south coast of the Crimea.
It is Yalta, beloved of all Russians, and I have come tramping to
it--which Russians never do--and I am intending to spend lazy days
looking with the gay town and all its white villas at the glorious
spectacle of the southern sea. All the rest of Russia is gripped by
winter, but here there is sanctuary and forgiveness. I have been
tramping on the cold, cold steppes, frozen, forced to get back into
myself and hide like the trees, and when I came here it seemed somehow
as if Nature herself had been angry with me, relented, and was now
showing me all her tenderness again. All along the road I found
violets in the little bushes, and I wore them as a forgiveness gift
from a woman that I love.
When a woman smiles upon a man she bids him live, and when she frowns
he can but die. To-day the woman of all women has smiled on me, Nature
herself.
Along the road I had that pleasant life with myself that one has the
day after one's birthday, when one has kept good resolutions two days.
My old self carried, as it were, within me a little child, and the
child chattered and lisped to me.
Delightful tramping along a road high over the shore! Below me,
stretching far to East and to West, blue and glorious like summer, was
the immense sea, all in dazzling radiance under the noonday sun. A
bank of grey-blue mist lay over the South, and marked the domain where
winter was felt. Up above me stood great grey rocks, stained here and
there the colour of rose porphyry. The tops of these rocks, even here
as I look up at them from Yalta, are outlined with a bright white
line--winter and hoar-frost hold sway there also.
I have been in the sight of nut-brown hillsides, something absolutely
perfect, the warm living colour of thousands of little, closely
packed French oak trees, all withered, and holding still their little
withered leaves. The colour of these hills was the colour of Nature's
eyes.
There was silence too--such wonderful silence, one could hear one's
own heart beating. Such a morning was indeed what Richter calls a
"still-creation-day," that still silence of the heart that prefaces
new revelation, as the brooding of the dove on the waters the creation
of a world. You must know I saw the dawn, and have been with the sun
all day. I slept at a Greek coffee-house, but was up whilst the sky
was yet dark and the waves all cloudy purple. There was just one gleam
of light in the dark sky, just one little promise. The great cliffs
were all in their night cloaks, and night shapes were on the road. All
Nature was in the night world, and I felt as if I were continuing my
last night's tramping, and not starting upon a new day. Yet in the
night of my heart was also just that one gleam of whiteness in the
East, one little promise. I knew the whiteness must get more and more,
and the darkness less and less. I stood on the cliff road and watched
the waves become all alive, playing with their shadows as the light
diffused in the sky, and the white lines of the East turned to rosy
ribbons. Then the dawn twilight came and the night shapes slunk away.
The Tartars and Greeks took down their shutters in the little village
hard by.
The sea became green, the rocks all grey, and then, as I watched, the
rim of the sun rose over the horizon and the sea held it as a scimitar
of fire. The white disc rose, a miracle; it looked very large, as if
it had grown bigger in the night. It paused a moment in the sea and
then suddenly seemed to bound up from it: it flooded the world with
light. Then, as if from his hands angels were leaping, thousands of
gulls were descried on the sea, their gleaming wings seeming to be the
very meaning of morning. Out of the sea under the dawn, dark dolphins
came leaping toward the shore. The sea became a grey expanse over
which the sun made a silver roadway. There commenced the quiet, quiet
morning, and the still-creation-day.
Now the day is ending, and the sun goes down behind the hills at
Yalta, the mist bank over the southern horizon catches the reflection
of true sunset tints, and transmits them to the velvety water, full of
light-rings. I have been sitting on a pleasure seat on the sand all
the afternoon, and now I go to the end of the long pier. There one may
see another vision of the mystery of the day, for the sea-waves are
full of living autumn colours, of luminous withered leaves and faded
rose petals; they are still living velvet, the night garment of a
queen. Black ducks are swimming mysteriously on the glowing dusky
water.
In a moment, however, the scene has changed and the colours have been
withdrawn. The presence in the world, the queen whom we call Day, has
passed over the waves and disappeared; not even a fold of the long
train of her dress is visible.
Some one has lighted a Roman candle at the far end of the pier, as
a signal to a steamer whose white and red lanterns have just been
descried upon the dark horizon. It is night: the day is over.