... That voice pursued him into the darkness of his chilly
room,--haunted him in the silence of his lodging. And then began
within the man that ghostly struggle between courage and despair,
between patient reason and mad revolt, between weakness and force,
between darkness and light, which all sensitive and generous natures
must wage in their own souls at least once--perhaps many times--in
their lives. Memory, in such moments, plays like an electric
storm;--all involuntarily he found himself reviewing his life.
Incidents long forgotten came back with singular vividness: he saw the
Past as he had not seen it while it was the Present;--remembrances of
home, recollections of infancy, recurred to him with terrible
intensity,--the artless pleasures and the trifling griefs, the little
hurts and the tender pettings, the hopes and the anxieties of those who
loved him, the smiles and tears of slaves ... And his first Creole
pony, a present from his father the day after he had proved himself
able to recite his prayers correctly in French, without one
mispronunciation--without saying crasse for grace,--and yellow Michel,
who taught him to swim and to fish and to paddle a pirogue;--and the
bayou, with its wonder-world of turtles and birds and creeping
things;--and his German tutor, who could not pronounce the j;--and the
songs of the cane-fields,--strangely pleasing, full of quaverings and
long plaintive notes, like the call of the cranes ... Tou', tou' pays
blanc! ... Afterward Camaniere had leased the place;--everything must
have been changed; even the songs could not be the same. Tou', tou'
pays blare!--Danie qui commande ...
And then Paris; and the university, with its wild under-life,--some
debts, some follies; and the frequent fond letters from home to which
he might have replied so much oftener;--Paris, where talent is
mediocrity; Paris, with its thunders and its splendors and its seething
of passion;--Paris, supreme focus of human endeavor, with its madnesses
of art, its frenzied striving to express the Inexpressible, its
spasmodic strainings to clutch the Unattainable, its soarings of
soul-fire to the heaven of the Impossible ...
What a rejoicing there was at his return!--how radiant and level the
long Road of the Future seemed to open before him!--everywhere
friends, prospects, felicitations. Then his first serious love;--and
the night of the ball at St. Martinsville,--the vision of light!
Gracile as a palm, and robed at once so simply, so exquisitely in
white, she had seemed to him the supreme realization of all possible
dreams of beauty ... And his passionate jealousy; and the slap from
Laroussel; and the humiliating two-minute duel with rapiers in which he
learned that he had found his master. The scar was deep. Why had not
Laroussel killed him then? ... Not evil-hearted, Laroussel,--they
used to salute each other afterward when they met; and Laroussel's
smile was kindly. Why had he refrained from returning it? Where was
Laroussel now?
For the death of his generous father, who had sacrificed so much to
reform him; for the death, only a short while after, of his
all-forgiving mother, he had found one sweet woman to console him with
her tender words, her loving lips, her delicious caress. She had given
him Zouzoune, the darling link between their lives,--Zouzoune, who
waited each evening with black Eglantine at the gate to watch for his
coming, and to cry through all the house like a bird, "Papa, lape
vini!--papa Zulien ape vini!" ... And once that she had made him very
angry by upsetting the ink over a mass of business papers, and he had
slapped her (could he ever forgive himself?)--she had cried, through
her sobs of astonishment and pain:--"To laimin moin?--to batte moin!"
(Thou lovest me?--thou beatest me!) Next month she would have been five
years old. To laimin moin?--to batte moin! ...
A furious paroxysm of grief convulsed him, suffocated him; it seemed to
him that something within must burst, must break. He flung himself
down upon his bed, biting the coverings in order to stifle his outcry,
to smother the sounds of his despair. What crime had he ever done, oh
God! that he should be made to suffer thus?--was it for this he had
been permitted to live? had been rescued from the sea and carried
round all the world unscathed? Why should he live to remember, to
suffer, to agonize? Was not Ramirez wiser?
How long the contest within him lasted, he never knew; but ere it was
done, he had become, in more ways than one, a changed man. For the
first,--though not indeed for the last time,--something of the deeper
and nobler comprehension of human weakness and of human suffering had
been revealed to him,--something of that larger knowledge without which
the sense of duty can never be fully acquired, nor the understanding of
unselfish goodness, nor the spirit of tenderness. The suicide is not a
coward; he is an egotist.
A ray of sunlight touched his wet pillow,--awoke him. He rushed to the
window, flung the latticed shutters apart, and looked out.
Something beautiful and ghostly filled all the vistas,--frost-haze; and
in some queer way the mist had momentarily caught and held the very
color of the sky. An azure fog! Through it the quaint and checkered
street--as yet but half illumined by the sun,--took tones of impossible
color; the view paled away through faint bluish tints into transparent
purples;--all the shadows were indigo. How sweet the morning!--how
well life seemed worth living! Because the sun had shown his face
through a fairy veil of frost! ...