II

Hours, days, and weeks began to pass. Sailors assert that sometimes

when the sea is greatly roused, something from out the midst of night

and darkness calls them by name. If the infinity of the sea may call

out thus, perhaps when a man is growing old, calls come to him, too,

from another infinitely still darker and more deeply mysterious; and

the more he is wearied by life the dearer are those calls to him.

But to hear them quiet is needed. Besides old age loves to put

itself aside as if with a foreboding of the grave. The lighthouse

had become for Skavinski such a half grave. Nothing is more

monotonous than life on a beacon-tower. If young people consent to

take up this service they leave it after a time. Lighthouse keepers

are generally men not young, gloomy, and confined to themselves. If

by chance one of them leaves his lighthouse and goes among men, he

walks in the midst of them like a person roused from deep slumber.

On the tower there is a lack of minute impressions which in ordinary

life teach men to adapt themselves to everything. All that a

lighthouse keeper comes in contact with is gigantic, and devoid of

definitely outlined forms. The sky is one whole, the water another;

and between those two infinities the soul of man is in loneliness.

That is a life in which thought is continual meditation, and out of

that meditation nothing rouses the keeper, not even his work. Day is

like day as two beads in a rosary, unless changes of weather form the

only variety. But Skavinski felt more happiness than ever in life

before. He rose with the dawn, took his breakfast, polished the

lens, and then sitting on the balcony gazed into the distance of the

water; and his eyes were never sated with the pictures which he saw

before him. On the enormous turquoise ground of the ocean were to be

seen generally flocks of swollen sails gleaming in the rays of the

sun so brightly that the eyes were blinking before the excess of

light. Sometimes the ships, favoured by the so-called trade winds,

went in an extended line one after another, like a chain of sea-mews

or albatrosses. The red casks indicating the channel swayed on the

light wave with gentle movement. Among the sails appeared every

afternoon gigantic grayish feather-like plumes of smoke. That was a

steamer from New York which brought passengers and goods to

Aspinwall, drawing behind it a frothy path of foam. On the other

side of the balcony Skavinski saw, as if on his palm, Aspinwall and

its busy harbour, and in it a forest of masts, boats and craft; a

little farther, white houses and the towers of the town. From the

height of his tower the small houses were like the nests of sea-mews,

the boats were like beetles and the people moved around like small

points on the white boulevard. From early morning a light eastern

breeze brought a confused hum of human life, above which predominated

the whistle of steamers. In the afternoon six o'clock came; the

movement in the harbour began to cease; the mews hid themselves in

the rent of the cliffs; the waves grew feeble and became in some sort

lazy; and then on the land, on the sea, and on the tower came a time

of stillness unbroken by anything. The yellow sands from which the

waves had fallen back glittered like golden stripes on the width of

the waters; the body of the tower was outlined definitely in blue.

Floods of sunbeams were poured from the sky on the water and the

sands and the cliff. At that time a certain lassitude full of

sweetness seized the old man. He felt that the rest which he was

enjoying was excellent; and when he thought that it would be

continuous nothing was lacking to him.

Skavinski was intoxicated with his own happiness and since a man

adapts himself easily to improved condition, he gained faith and

confidence by degrees; for he thought that if men built houses for

invalids, why should not God gather up at last His own invalids?

Time passed, and confirmed him in this conviction. The old man grew

accustomed to his tower, to the lantern, to the rock, to the

sand-bars, to solitude. He grew accustomed also to the sea-mews

which hatched in the crevices of the rock, and in the evening held

meetings on the roof of the lighthouse. Skavinski threw to them

generally the remnants of his food; and soon they grew tame, and

afterward, when he fed them, a real storm of white wings encircled

him, and the old man went among the birds like a shepherd among

sheep. When the tide ebbed he went to the low sand-banks, on which

he collected savory periwinkles and beautiful pearl shells of the

nautilus, which receding waves had left on the sand. In the night by

the moonlight and the tower he went to catch fish, which frequented

the windings of the cliff in myriads. At last he was in love with

his rocks and his treeless little island, grown over only with small

thick plants exuding sticky resin. The distant views repaid him for

the poverty of the island, however. During afternoon hours, when the

air became very clear he could see the whole isthmus covered with the

richest vegetation. It seemed to Skavinski at such times that he saw

one gigantic garden,--bunches of cocoa, and enormous musa, combined,

as it were, in luxurious tufted bouquets, right there behind the

houses of Aspinwall. Farther on, between Aspinwall and Panama, was a

great forest over which every morning and evening hung a reddish haze

of exhalations,--a real tropical forest with its feet in stagnant

water, interlaced with lianas and filled with the sound of one sea of

gigantic orchids, palms, milk-trees, iron-trees, gum-trees.

Through his field-glass the old man could see not only trees and the

broad leaves of bananas, but even legions of monkeys and great

marabous and flocks of parrots, rising at times like a rainbow cloud

over the forest. Skavinski knew such forests well, for after being

wrecked on the Amazon he had wandered whole weeks among similar

arches and thickets. He had seen how many dangers and deaths lie

concealed under those wonderful and smiling exteriors. During the

nights which he had spent in them he heard close at hand the

sepulchral voices of howling monkeys and the roaring of the jaguars;

he saw gigantic serpents coiled like lianas on trees; he knew those

slumbering forest lakes full of torpedo-fish and swarming crocodiles;

he knew under what a yoke man lives in those unexplored wildernesses

in which are single leaves that exceed a man's size ten

times,--wildernesses swarming with blood-drinking mosquitoes,

tree-leeches, and gigantic poisonous spiders. He had experienced

that forest life himself, had witnessed it, had passed through it;

therefore it gave him the greater enjoyment to look from his height

and gaze on those _matos_, admire their beauty, and be guarded from

their treacherousness. His tower preserved him from every evil. He

left it only for a few hours on Sunday. He put on then his blue

keeper's coat with silver buttons, and hung his crosses on his

breast. His milk-white head was raised with a certain pride when he

heard at the door, while entering the church, the Creoles say among

themselves, "We have an honourable lighthouse keeper and not a

heretic, though he is a Yankee." But he returned straightway after

Mass to his island, and returned happy, for he had still no faith in

the mainland. On Sunday also he read the Spanish newspaper which he

bought in the town, or the _New York Herald_, which he borrowed from

Falconbridge; and he sought in it European news eagerly. The poor

old heart on that lighthouse tower, and in another hemisphere, was

beating yet for its birthplace. At times, too, when the boat brought

his daily supplies and water to the island, he went down from the

tower to talk with Johnson, the guard. But after awhile he seemed to

grow shy. He ceased to go to the town to read the papers and to go

down to talk politics with Johnson. Whole weeks passed in this way,

so that no one saw him and he saw no one. The only signs that the

old man was living were the disappearance of the provisions left on

shore, and the light of the lantern kindled every evening with the

same regularity with which the sun rose in the morning from the

waters of those regions. Evidently, the old man had become

indifferent to the world. Homesickness was not the cause, but just

this,--that even homesickness had passed into resignation. The whole

world began now and ended for Skavinski on his island. He had grown

accustomed to the thought that he would not leave the tower till his

death, and he simply forgot that there was anything else besides it.

Moreover, he had become a mystic; his mild blue eyes began to stare

like the eyes of a child, and were as if fixed on something at a

distance. In the presence of a surrounding uncommonly simple and

great, the old man was losing the feeling of personality; he was

ceasing to exist as an individual, was becoming merged more and more

in that which inclosed him. He did not understand anything beyond

his environment: he felt only unconsciously. At last it seems to him

that the heavens, the water, his rock, the tower, the golden

sand-banks and the swollen sails, the sea-mews, the ebb and flow of

the tide--all form a mighty unity. One enormous mysterious soul;

that he is sinking in that mystery and feels that soul which lives

and lulls itself. He sinks and is rocked, forgets himself; and in

that narrowing of his own individual existence, in that half-waking,

half-sleeping, he has discovered a rest so great that it nearly

resembles half-death.