Before I finish writing of the confused memories I have of the
commencement of my life I wish to speak of another ray of sunshine--a
sad ray this time,--that has left an ineffaceable impression upon me,
and the meaning of which will never be clear to me.
Upon a Sunday, after we had returned from church, the ray appeared to
me. It came through a half-open window and fell into the stairway, and
as it lengthened itself upon the whiteness of the wall it took on a
peculiar, weird shape.
I had returned from church with my mother and as I mounted the stairs I
took her hand. The house was filled with a humming silence peculiar
to the noontime of very hot summer days (it was August or September).
Following the habit of our country the shutters were half closed making
indoors, during the heated period of the day, a sort of twilight.
As I entered the house there came to me an appreciation of the stillness
of Sunday that in the country and in peaceful byways of little towns
is like the peace of death. But when I saw the ray of sunlight fall
obliquely through the staircase window, I had a feeling more poignant
than ordinary sorrow; I had a feeling altogether incomprehensible and
absolutely new in which there seemed infused a conception of the brevity
of life's summers, their rapid flight and the incomputable ages of
the sun. But other elements still more mysterious, that it would be
impossible for me to explain even vaguely, entered therein.
I wish to add to the history of this ray of sunshine the sequel that is
intimately connected with it. Years passed; I became a man, and after
having been among many people and experienced many adventures I lived
for an autumn and winter in an isolated house in an unfrequented part
of Stamboul. It was there that every evening at approximately the same
hour, a ray of sunlight came in through the window and fell obliquely on
the wall and lit up the niche (hollowed out of the stone wall) in which
I had placed an Athenian vase. And I never saw that ray of sunlight
without thinking of the one I had seen upon that Sunday of long ago;
nor without having the same, precisely the same sad emotion, scarcely
diminished by time, and always full of the same mystery. And when I
had to leave Turkey, when I was obliged to quit my dangerous but adored
lodgings in Stamboul, with all my busy and hurried preparations for
departure there was mingled this strange regret: never more should I see
the oblique ray of sunshine come into the stairway window and fall upon
the niche in the wall where the Greek vase stood.
Perhaps under all of this there may have been, if not recollections of
a previous personal experience, at least the reflected inchoate thoughts
of ancestors which I am unable in any clearer way to bring out of
darkness. But enough! I must say no more, for I again find myself in the
land of vague fancy, gliding phantoms and illusive nothings.
For this almost unintelligible chapter there is no excuse that I can
offer, save that I have written it with the greatest frankness and
sincerity.