miles!--eight miles of magic,--eight miles of glory! O the unspeakable
beauty of it! It might be fifty feet in depth at times; yet every
pebble, every vein of the water-grass blades, every atom of sparkling
sand, is clearly visible as though viewed through sun-filled air; and
but for the iridescent myriads of darting fish, the scintillations of
jewel-color, we might well fancy our vessel floating low in air, like
a balloon whose buoyancy is feeble. Water-grasses and slippery moss
carpet much of the channel with a dark verdure that absorbs the light;
the fish and the tortoises seem to avoid those sandy reaches left naked
to the sun, as if fearful the great radiance would betray them, or as
though unable to endure the force of the beams descending undimmed
through all the translucent fathoms of the stream. It has no mystery
this laughing torrent, save the mystery of its subterranean birth; it
doffs all veils of shadow; the woods gradually withdraw from its banks;
and the fires of the Southern sun affect not the delicious frigidity
of its waves. Almost irresistible its fascination to the swimmer; one
envies the fishes that shoot by like flashes of opal, even the reptiles
that flee before the prow; a promise of strange joy? of electrical
caress, seems to smile from those luminous deeps,--like the witchery of
a Naiad, the blandishment of an Undine.
And so we float at last into a great basin, dark with the darkness of
profundities unfathomed by the sun;--the secret sources of the spring,
the place of its mystic fountain-birth, and the end of our pilgrimage.
Down, down, deep, there is a mighty quivering visible; but the surface
remains unmoved; the giant gush expends its strength far beneath us.
From what unilluminated caverns,--what subterranean lakes,--burst this
prodigious flow? Go ask the gnomes! Man may never answer. This is
the visible beginning indeed; but of the invisible beginning who may
speak?--not even the eye of the Sun hath discerned it; the light of the
universe hath never shone upon it.--Earth reveals much to the magicians
of science; but the dim secret of her abysses she keeps forever.
A TROPICAL INTERMEZZO
_The broken memory of a tale told in the last hours of a summer's
night to the old Mexican priest by a dying wanderer from the Spanish
Americas. Much the father marvelled at the quaintness of the accent of
the man? which was the quaintness of dead centuries_...
Now the land of which I tell thee is a low land, where all things
seem to have remained unchanged since the beginning of the world,--a
winterless land where winds are warm and weak, so that the leaves are
not moved by them,--a beshadowed land that ever seemeth to mourn with
a great mourning. For it is one mighty wold, and the trees there be
all hung with drooping plants and drooling vines, and dribbling mossy
things that pend queerly from the uppermost branchings even to the
crankling roots. And there be birds in that wold which do sing only
when the moon shineth full,--and they have voices, like to monks,--and
measured is their singing, and solemn, and of vasty sound,--and they
are not at all afraid. But when the sun shineth there prevaileth such
quiet as if some mighty witchcraft weighed upon the place; and all
things drowse in the great green silence.
Now on the night of which I tell thee, we had camped there; and it
seemed to me that we might in sooth have voyaged beyond the boundaries
of the world; for even the heavens were changed above us, and the
stars were not the same; and I could not sleep for thinking of the
strangeness of the land and of the sky. And about the third watch I
rose and went out under those stars, and looked at them, and listened
to the psalmody of the wonderful birds chanting in the night like
friars. Then a curious desire to wander alone into the deep woods came
upon me.--_En chica hora Dios obra_!--In that time I feared neither
man nor devil; and our commander held me the most desperate in that
desperate band; and I strode out of the camp without thought of peril.
The grizzled sentry desired to question me;--I cursed him and passed on.
And I was far away from the camp when the night grew pale, and the fire
of the great strange Cross of stars, about which I have told thee,
faded out, and I watched the edge of the East glow ruddy and ruddier
with the redness of iron in a smithy; until the sun rose up, yellow
like an orange is, with palm-leaves sharply limned against his face.
Then I heard the Spanish trumpets sounding their call through the
morning; but I did not desire to return. Whether it was the perfume of
the flowers, or the odors of unknown spice-trees or some enchantment in
the air, I could not tell thee; but I do remember that, as I wandered
on, a sudden resolve came to me never to rejoin those comrades of mine.
And a stranger feeling grew upon me like a weakness of heart,--like
a great sorrow for I knew not what; and the fierceness of the life
that I had lived passed away from me, and I was even as one about to
weep. Wild doves whirred down from the trees to perch on my casque and
armored shoulders; and I wondered that they suffered me to touch them
with my hands, and were in no wise afraid.
So day broadened and brightened above me; and it came to pass that I
found myself following a path where the trunks of prodigious trees
filed away like lines of pillars, reaching out of sight,--and their
branches made groinings like work of arches above me, so that it was
like a monstrous church; and the air was heavy with a perfume like
incense. All about me blazed those birds which are not bigger than
bees, but do seem to have been made by God out of all manner of jewels
and colored fire; also there were apes in multitude, and reptiles
beyond reckoning, and singing insects, and talking birds. Then I asked
myself whether I were not in one of those lands old Moors in Spain told
of,--lands near the sinking of the sun, where fountains of magical
water are. And fancy begetting fancy, it came to pass that I found me
dreaming of that which Juan Ponce de Leon sought.
Thus dreaming as I went on, it appeared to me that the green dimnesses
deepened, and the forest became loftier. And the trees now looked older
than the deluge; and the stems of the things that coiled and climbed
about them were enormous and gray; and the tatters of the pendent
mosses were blanched as with the hoariness of ages beyond reckoning.
Again I heard the trumpet sounding,--but so far off that the echo was
not louder than the droning of the great flies; and I was gladdened by
the fancy that it would soon have no power to reach mine ears.
And all suddenly I found myself within a vast clear space,--ringed
about by palms so lofty that their tops appeared to touch the sky, and
their shadows darkened all within the circle of them. And there was a
great silence awhile, broken only by the whispering of waters. My feet
made no sound, so thick was the moss I trod upon; and from the circle
of the palms on every side the ground sloped down to a great basin
of shimmering water. So clear it was that I could perceive sparkles
of gold in the sands below; and the water seemed forced upward in a
mighty underflow from the centre of the basin, where there was a deep,
dark place. And into the bright basin there trickled streamlets also
from beneath the roots of the immense trees; and I became aware of a
great subterrene murmuring, as if those waters--which are beneath the
earth--were all seeking to burst their way up to the sun.
Then, being foredone with heat and weariness, I doffed my armor and my
apparel and plunged into the pool of the fountain. And I discovered
that the brightness of the water had deluded me; for so deep was it
that by diving I could not reach the bottom. Neither was the fountain
tepid as are the slow river currents of that strange land, but of a
pleasant frigidness,--like those waters that leap among the rocks of
Castile. And I felt a new strength and a puissant joy, as one having
long traveled with burning feet through some fevered and fiery land
feeleth new life when the freshness of sea-winds striketh against his
face, and the jocund brawling of the great billows smiteth his ears
through the silence of desolation. And the joyousness I knew as a boy
seemed to flame through all my blood again,--so that I sported in the
luminous ripples and laughed aloud, and uttered shouts of glee; and
high above me in the ancient trees wonderful birds mocked my shoutings
and answered my laughter hoarsely, as with human voices. And when I
provoked them further, they did imitate my speech till it seemed that a
thousand echoes repeated me. And, having left the fount, no hunger nor
weariness weighed upon me,--but I yielded unto a feeling of delicious
drowsihead, and laid me down upon the moss to sleep as deeply as an
infant sleepeth.
Now, when I opened mine eyes again, I wondered greatly to behold a
woman bending over me,--and presently I wondered even much more, for
never until then had it been given me to look upon aught so comely.
Begirdled with flowers she was, but all ungarmented,--and lithe to
see as the rib of a palmleaf is,--and so aureate of color that she
seemed as one created of living gold. And her hair was long and sable
as wing-feathers of ravens are, with shifting gleams of blue,--and was
interwoven with curious white blossoms. And her eyes, for color like to
her hair, I could never describe for thee,--that large they were, and
limpid, and lustrous, and sweet-lidded! So gracious her stature and so
wonderful the lissomeness of her, that, for the first time, I verily
knew fear,--deeming it never possible that earthly being might be so
goodly to the sight. Nor did the awe that was upon me pass away until
I had seen her smile,--having dared to speak to her in my own tongue,
which she understood not at all. But when I had made certain signs she
brought me fruits fragrant and golden as her own skin; and as she bent
over me again our lips met, and with the strange joy of it I felt even
as one about to die,--for her mouth was--
['Nay, my son,' said the priest, preventing him, 'dwell not upon such
things. Already the hand of death is on thee; waste not these priceless
moments in speech of vanity,--rather confess thee speedily that I may
absolve thee from thy grievous sin.']
So be it, _padre mio_, I will speak to thee only of that which a
confessor should know. But I may surely tell thee those were the
happiest of my years; for in that low dim land even Earth and Heaven
seemed to kiss; and never did other mortal feel the joy I knew of,
love that wearies never and youth that passeth never away. Verily, it
was the Eden-garden, the Paradise of Eve. Fruits succulent and perfume
were our food,--the moss, springy and ever cool, formed our bed, made
odorous with flowers; and for night-lamps we prisoned those wondrous
flies that sparkle through darkness like falling stars. Never a cloud
or tempest,--no fierce rain nor parching heat, but spring everlasting,
filled with scent of undying flowers, and perpetual laughter of waters,
and piping of silver-throated birds. Rarely did we wander far from that
murmuring hollow. My cuirass, and casque, and good sword of Seville, I
allowed to rust away; my garments fell into dust; but neither weapon
nor garment were needed where all was drowsy joy and unchanging warmth.
Once she whispered to me in my own tongue, which she had learned with
marvelous ease, though I, indeed, never could acquire hers: 'Dost know,
_Querido mio_, here one may never grow old?' Then only I spake to her
about that fountain which Juan Ponce de Leon sought, and told her the
marvels related of it, and questioned her curiously about it. But she
smiled, and pressed her pliant golden fingers upon my lips, and would
not suffer me to ask more,--neither could I at any time after find
heart to beseech her further regarding matters she was not fain to
converse of.
Yet ever and anon she bade me well beware that I should not trust
myself to stray alone into the deep dimness beyond the dale of the
fountains: '_Lest the Shadows lay hold upon thee_,' she said. And I
laughed low at her words, never discerning that the Shadows whereof she
spake were those that Age and Death cast athwart the sunshine of the
world.
['Nay, nay, my son,' again spoke the priest; 'tell me not of Shadows,
but of thy great sins only; for the night waneth, and thine hour is not
far off.']
Be not fearful, father; I may not die before I have told thee all.... I
have spoken of our happiness; now must I tell thee of our torment--the
strangest thing of all? Dost remember what I related to thee about the
sound of the trumpet summoning me? Now was it not a ghostly thing that
I should hear every midnight that same summons,--not faintly as before,
but loud and long--once? Night after night, ever at the same hour,
and ever with the same sonority, even when lying in her arms, I heard
it--as a voice of brass, rolling through the world. And whensoever that
cursed sound came to us, she trembled in the darkness, and linked her
arms more tightly about me, and wept, and would not be comforted till I
had many times promised that I should not forsake her. And through all
those years I heard that trumpet-call--years, said I?--nay, _centuries_
(since in that place there is not any time nor any age)--I heard it
through long centuries after all my comrades had been laid within their
graves.
[And the stranger gazed with strange inquiry into the priest's face;
but he crossed himself silently, and spoke no word.]
And nightly I strove to shut out the sound from my ears and could not;
and nightly the torment of hearing it ever increased like a torment of
hell--_ay de mit_ nightly, for uncounted generations of years! So that
in time a great fury would seize me whenever the cursed echoes came;
and, one dark hour, when she seemed to hear it not, and slept deeply,
I sought my rusted blade, and betook me toward the sound,--beyond
the dale of fountains--into the further dimness of swaying
mosses,--whither, meseems, the low land trendeth southward and toward
those wan wastes which are not land nor water, yet which do quake to a
great and constant roaring as of waves in wrath.
[A moment the voice of the aged man failed him, and his frame quivered
as in the beginning of agony.]
Now I feel, padre, that but little time is allotted me to speak. I may
never recount to thee my wanderings, and they, indeed, are of small
moment.--Enough to tell thee that I never again could find the path
to the fountains and to her, so that she became lost to me. And when
I found myself again among men, lo! the whole world was changed, and
the Spaniards I met spake not the tongue of my time, and they mocked
the quaintness of my ways and jibed at the fashion of my speech. And
my tale I dared tell to none, through fear of being confined with
madmen, save to thee alone, and for this purpose only I summoned thee.
Surely had I lived much in this new age of thine men must have deemed
me bereft of reason, seeing that my words and ways were not like unto
theirs; but I have passed my years in the morasses of unknown tropics,
with the python and the cayman,--and in the dark remoteness of forests
inhabited by monstrous things,--and in forgotten ruins of dead Indian
cities,--and by shores of strange rivers that have no names,--until
my hair whitened and my limbs were withered and my great strength was
utterly spent in looking for her.
'Verily, my son,' spake the confessor, 'any save a priest might well
deem thee mad,--though thy speech and thy story be not of to-day. Yet I
do believe thy tale. Awesome it is and strange; but the traditions of
the Holy Church contain things that are not less strange: witness the
legend of the Blessed Seven of Ephesus, whose lives were three hundred
and sixty years preserved that the heresy concerning the resurrection
of the flesh might be confounded forever. Even in some such way hath
the Lord preserved thee through the centuries for this thine hour of
repentance. Commend, therefore, thy soul to God, repentingly, and
banish utterly from thee that evil spirit who still tempts thee in the
semblance of woman.'
'Repent!' wonderingly spake the wanderer, whose great black eyes flamed
up again as with the fires of his youth; 'I do not repent, I shall
never repent,--nor did I summon thee hither that thou shouldst seek
to stir me to any repentance.--Nay! more than mine own soul I love
her,--unutterably, unswervingly, everlastingly! Aye! greater a thousand
fold is my love of her than is thy hope of heaven, thy dread of death,
thy fear of hell.--Repent--beyond all time shall I love her, through
eternity of eternities,--aye! as thou wouldst say, even _por los siglos
de los siglos_.'
Kneeling devoutly, the confessor covered his face with his hands, and
prayed even as he had never prayed before. When he lifted his eyes
again, lo! the soul had passed away unshriven;--but there was such
a smile upon the dead face that the priest marveled, and murmured,
with his lips: '_Surely he hath found Her at last_!'--Faintly, with
the coming of the dawn, a warm south wind moved the curtains, and
bare into the chamber rich scent of magnolia and of jessamine and of
those fair blossoms whose odor evoketh beloved memory of long-dead
bridal-mornings,--until it seemed that a weird sweet Presence invisible
had entered, all silently, and stood there even as a Watcher standeth.
And all the East brightened;--and, touched by the yellow magic of the
sun, the vapors above the place of his rising formed themselves into a
Fountain of Gold.
A NAME IN THE PLAZA
_June_ 3, 18--
I
Sometimes, in that Gloaming that divides deep sleep from the
awakening,--when out of the world of wavering memories the first thin
fancies begin to soar, like neuroptera, rising on diaphanous wing from
a waste of marsh-grasses,--there suddenly comes an old, old longing
that stings thought into nervous activity with a sharp pain. The
impression in the first moment of wakefulness might be likened to a
sense of nostalgia,--but the nostalgia which is rather a world-sickness
than a homesickness; there is something in it also resembling the vain
regret for what has been left perhaps twenty-years' journey behind us,
and has now become a tropical remembrance because we have traveled so
far toward the Northern Circle of life. Yet the longing I refer to is
more puissant and more subtle than these definable feelings are;--it
has almost the force of an impulse; it has no real affinity with the
recognizable Past; its visions are archipelagoes which never loomed for
us over the heaving of any remembered seas; it is like an unutterable
wish to flee away from the Present into the Unknown,--a beautiful
unknown, radiant with impossible luminosities of azure and sun-gold! I
do not know how to account for this impulse,--unless as an unexplained
Something in Man corresponding to the instinct of migration in lower
forms of life--especially in those happy winged creatures privileged
to follow the perfumed Summer round about the world. And I think it
comes to us usually either with the first lukewarm burst of spring,
or with the windy glories of autumn. Nevertheless, in the morning it
came, out of season, and remained with me, while I watched from the
balcony birds and ships alike fleeting tropicward with many-colored
wings outspread, and thought of a tame crane at home,--with one wing
hopelessly maimed,--that used to cry out bitterly to processions of his
wild kindred sailing above the city roofs on their way to other skies.
Why these longings for lands in which we shall never be?--why this
desire for that azure into which we cannot soar?--whence our mysterious
love for that tumultuous deep into whose emerald secrets we may never
peer?--Can it be that through countless epochs of the immemorial
phylogenesis of man,--through all those myriad changes suggested by the
prenatal evolution of the human heart,--through all the slow marvelous
transition from fish to mammal,--there have actually persisted
impulses, desires, sensations, whereof the enigma may be fully
interpreted by some new science only,--a future science of psychical
dysteleology?...
So musing, I found my way to the Plaza.
Has it not often seemed to you that the more antiquated and the more
unfamiliar an object or a place is, the more it appears at first sight
to live,--to possess a sort of inner being, a fetish-spirit, a soul?
I thought that morning the ancient Plaza had such a soul, and that it
spoke to me in its mysterious dumb way, as if saying: 'Come look at me,
because I am very, very old;--but do not look at the sulphur fountain
which the Americans have made, nor at the monument they have built; for
those are not of the centuries to which I belong.'
So I entered, and idled awhile among the palms that threw spidery
shadows under the noon-light; and I deciphered the old inscription upon
the coquina pillar:--'PLAZA DE LA CONSTITUCION...;'--paying little
heed to the song of the artesian spring, and scarcely vouchsafing a
furtive glance to the newer monument, which I saw was not artistic, not
imposing, but naïve and almost cumbrous. Suddenly my indifferent eye
noted a graven word which revealed that the newer structure had been
erected by Love, and for Love's sake only. And then, all unexpectedly,
the very artlessness of the monument touched me as with a voiceless
reproach,--touched me like the artlessness of a face in tears: so much
of tender pain revealed itself through the simplicity of the chiseled
words, OUR DEAD,--through the commonplaceness of the inscription,
'_Erected by the Ladies' Memorial Association_.' Then I walked around
the monument, perusing on each of its white faces the roll-call of the
dead,--sons, brothers, lovers,--the names of your darlings, gentle
women of Saint Augustine! I read them every one; carefully spelling out
many a Spanish name of Andalusian origin: sonorous appellations holding
in their syllables etymological suggestions of Arabian ancestry--names
swarthy and beautiful as an Oriental face might be. And all the while,
--dominating the perfume of blossoms, and the keen sweet scent of
aromatic grasses,--the sulphureous smell of the Volcanic spring came
to me grimly through the warm aureate air,--like an odor of battles!
There was a name upon that white stone which affected me in a singular
way,--a name that by contrast with those dark Spanish ones seemed fair,
blonde as gold! In someplace--at some time, I had known that name.--But
where?--but when?
Even as a perfume may create for us the spectre of a vanished day, or
as a melody may suddenly evoke for us the forgotten tone of some dear
voice,--so may the sound or sight of a name momentarily revive for us
all the faded colors of some memory-portrait so beautiful, so beloved,
that we had become afraid to look at it, and had permitted innumerable
spiders of Monotony to weave their tintless gauze before its face. But
we have had experiences which are now so long dead and so profoundly
sepultured in the Cemetery of Recollection that no mnemonic necromancy
can lend them recognizable outline; they have become totally
spiritualized, and reveal themselves only as faint wind-stirrings in
the atmosphere of Thought.
Surely the experience connected in some vague way with that blonde name
must have belonged to these:--the memory _had_ been; for I knew the
presence of its ghost; but viewless it obstinately remained.
It pursued me through the amber afternoon. By some inexplicable mental
process I discovered that it had been also associated with an idea of
death, a melancholy fancy, at the time, that I had heard or had seen it
before.--But when?--but where did I first learn that name? ... Night
came, but brought with it no answer to the enigma.