... She began to learn the life of the coast.
With her acquisition of another tongue, there came to her also the
understanding of many things relating to the world of the sea She
memorized with novel delight much that was told her day by day
concerning the nature surrounding her,--many secrets of the air, many
of those signs of heaven which the dwellers in cities cannot comprehend
because the atmosphere is thickened and made stagnant above
them--cannot even watch because the horizon is hidden from their eyes
by walls, and by weary avenues of trees with whitewashed trunks. She
learned, by listening, by asking, by observing also, how to know the
signs that foretell wild weather:--tremendous sunsets, scuddings and
bridgings of cloud,--sharpening and darkening of the sea-line,--and the
shriek of gulls flashing to land in level flight, out of a still
transparent sky,--and halos about the moon.
She learned where the sea-birds, with white bosoms and brown wings,
made their hidden nests of sand,--and where the cranes waded for their
prey,--and where the beautiful wild-ducks, plumaged in satiny lilac and
silken green, found their food,--and where the best reeds grew to
furnish stems for Feliu's red-clay pipe,--and where the ruddy sea-beans
were most often tossed upon the shore,--and how the gray pelicans
fished all together, like men--moving in far-extending semicircles,
beating the flood with their wings to drive the fish before them.
And from Carmen she learned the fables and the sayings of the sea,--the
proverbs about its deafness, its avarice, its treachery, its terrific
power,--especially one that haunted her for all time thereafter: Si
quieres aprender a orar, entra en el mar (If thou wouldst learn to
pray, go to the sea). She learned why the sea is salt,--how "the tears
of women made the waves of the sea,"--and how the sea has ii no
friends,--and how the cat's eyes change with the tides.
What had she lost of life by her swift translation from the dusty
existence of cities to the open immensity of nature's freedom? What did
she gain?
Doubtless she was saved from many of those little bitternesses and
restraints and disappointments which all well-bred city children must
suffer in the course of their training for the more or less factitious
life of society:--obligations to remain very still with every nimble
nerve quivering in dumb revolt;--the injustice of being found
troublesome and being sent to bed early for the comfort of her
elders;--the cruel necessity of straining her pretty eyes, for many
long hours at a time, over grimy desks in gloomy school-rooms, though
birds might twitter and bright winds flutter in the trees without;--the
austere constrains and heavy drowsiness of warm churches, filled with
the droning echoes of a voice preaching incomprehensible things;--the
progressively augmenting weariness of lessons in deportment, in
dancing, in music, in the impossible art of keeping her dresses
unruffled and unsoiled. Perhaps she never had any reason to regret all
these.
She went to sleep and awakened with the wild birds;--her life remained
as unfettered by formalities as her fine feet by shoes. Excepting
Carmen's old prayer-book,--in which she learned to read a little,--her
childhood passed without books,--also without pictures, without
dainties, without music, without theatrical amusements. But she saw
and heard and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens and
the earth, is yet eternally new and eternally young with the holiness
of beauty,--eternally mystical and divine,--eternally weird: the
unveiled magnificence of Nature's moods,--the perpetual poem hymned by
wind and surge,--the everlasting splendor of the sky.
She saw the quivering pinkness of waters curled by the breath of the
morning--under the deepening of the dawn--like a far fluttering and
scattering of rose-leaves of fire;--
Saw the shoreless, cloudless, marvellous double-circling azure of
perfect summer days--twin glories of infinite deeps inter-reflected,
while the Soul of the World lay still, suffused with a jewel-light, as
of vaporized sapphire;--
Saw the Sea shift color,--"change sheets,"--when the viewless Wizard of
the Wind breathed upon its face, and made it green;--
Saw the immeasurable panics,--noiseless, scintillant,--which silver,
summer after summer, curved leagues of beach with bodies of little
fish--the yearly massacre of migrating populations, nations of
sea-trout, driven from their element by terror;--and the winnowing of
shark-fins,--and the rushing of porpoises,--and the rising of the
grande-ecaille, like a pillar of flame,--and the diving and pitching
and fighting of the frigates and the gulls,--and the armored hordes of
crabs swarming out to clear the slope after the carnage and the gorging
had been done;--
Saw the Dreams of the Sky,--scudding mockeries of ridged foam,--and
shadowy stratification of capes and coasts and promontories long-drawn
out,--and imageries, multicolored, of mountain frondage, and sierras
whitening above sierras,--and phantom islands ringed around with
lagoons of glory;--
Saw the toppling and smouldering of cloud-worlds after the enormous
conflagration of sunsets,--incandescence ruining into darkness; and
after it a moving and climbing of stars among the blacknesses,--like
searching lamps;--
Saw the deep kindle countless ghostly candles as for mysterious
night-festival,--and a luminous billowing under a black sky, and
effervescences of fire, and the twirling and crawling of phosphoric
foam;--
Saw the mesmerism of the Moon;--saw the enchanted tides self-heaped in
muttering obeisance before her.
Often she heard the Music of the Marsh through the night: an infinity
of flutings and tinklings made by tiny amphibia,--like the low blowing
of numberless little tin horns, the clanking of billions of little
bells;--and, at intervals, profound tones, vibrant and heavy, as of a
bass viol--the orchestra of the great frogs! And interweaving with it
all, one continuous shrilling,--keen as the steel speech of a saw,--the
stridulous telegraphy of crickets.
But always,--always, dreaming or awake, she heard the huge blind Sea
chanting that mystic and eternal hymn, which none may hear without awe,
which no musician can learn,--
Heard the hoary Preacher,--El Pregonador,--preaching the ancient Word,
the word "as a fire, and as a hammer that breaketh the rock in
pieces,"--the Elohim--Word of the Sea! ...
Unknowingly she came to know the immemorial sympathy of the mind with
the Soul of the World,--the melancholy wrought by its moods of gray,
the reverie responsive to its vagaries of mist, the exhilaration of its
vast exultings--days of windy joy, hours of transfigured light.
She felt,--even without knowing it,--the weight of the Silences, the
solemnities of sky and sea in these low regions where all things seem
to dream--waters and grasses with their momentary wavings,--woods
gray-webbed with mosses that drip and drool,--horizons with their
delusions of vapor,--cranes meditating in their marshes,--kites
floating in the high blue.... Even the children were singularly quiet;
and their play less noisy--though she could not have learned the
difference--than the play of city children. Hour after hour, the women
sewed or wove in silence. And the brown men,--always barefooted,
always wearing rough blue shirts,--seemed, when they lounged about the
wharf on idle days, as if they had told each other long ago all they
knew or could ever know, and had nothing more to say. They would stare
at the flickering of the current, at the drifting of clouds and
buzzard:--seldom looking at each other, and always turning their black
eyes again, in a weary way, to sky or sea. Even thus one sees the
horses and the cattle of the coast, seeking the beach to escape the
whizzing flies;--all watch the long waves rolling in, and sometimes
turn their heads a moment to look at one another, but always look back
to the waves again, as if wondering at a mystery....
How often she herself had wondered--wondered at the multiform changes
of each swell as it came in--transformations of tint, of shape, of
motion, that seemed to betoken a life infinitely more subtle than the
strange cold life of lizards and of fishes,--and sinister, and
spectral. Then they all appeared to move in order,--according to one
law or impulse;--each had its own voice, yet all sang one and the same
everlasting song. Vaguely, as she watched them and listened to them,
there came to her the idea of a unity of will in their motion, a unity
of menace in their utterance--the idea of one monstrous and complex
life! The sea lived: it could crawl backward and forward; it could
speak!--it only feigned deafness and sightlessness for some malevolent
end. Thenceforward she feared to find herself alone with it. Was it
not at her that it strove to rush, muttering, and showing its white
teeth, ... just because it knew that she was all by herself? ... Si
quieres aprender a orar, entra en el mar! And Concha had well learned
to pray. But the sea seemed to her the one Power which God could not
make to obey Him as He pleased. Saying the creed one day, she repeated
very slowly the opening words,--"Creo en un Dios, padre todopoderoso,
Criador de cielo y de la tierra,"--and paused and thought. Creator of
Heaven and Earth? "Madrecita Carmen," she asked,--"quien entonces hizo
el mar?" (who then made the sea?).
--"Dios, mi querida," answered Carmen.--"God, my darling.... All things
were made by Him" (todas las cosas fueron hechas por El).
Even the wicked Sea! And He had said unto it: "Thus far, and no
farther." ... Was that why it had not overtaken and devoured her when
she ran back in fear from the sudden reaching out of its waves? Thus
far....? But there were times when it disobeyed--when it rushed
further, shaking the world! Was it because God was then asleep--could
not hear, did not see, until too late?
And the tumultuous ocean terrified her more and more: it filled her
sleep with enormous nightmare;--it came upon her in dreams,
mountain-shadowing,--holding her with its spell, smothering her power
of outcry, heaping itself to the stars.
Carmen became alarmed;--she feared that the nervous and delicate child
might die in one of those moaning dreams out of which she had to arouse
her, night after night. But Feliu, answering her anxiety with one of
his favorite proverbs, suggested a heroic remedy:--
--"The world is like the sea: those who do not know how to swim in it
are drowned;--and the sea is like the world," he added.... "Chita must
learn to swim!"
And he found the time to teach her. Each morning, at sunrise, he took
her into the water. She was less terrified the first time than Carmen
thought she would be;--she seemed to feel confidence in Feliu; although
she screamed piteously before her first ducking at his hands. His
teaching was not gentle. He would carry her out, perched upon his
shoulder, until the water rose to his own neck; and there he would
throw her from him, and let her struggle to reach him again as best she
could. The first few mornings she had to be pulled out almost at once;
but after that Feliu showed her less mercy, and helped her only when he
saw she was really in danger. He attempted no other instruction until
she had learned that in order to save herself from being half choked by
the salt water, she must not scream; and by the time she became
habituated to these austere experiences, she had already learned by
instinct alone how to keep herself afloat for a while, how to paddle a
little with her hands. Then he commenced to train her to use them,--to
lift them well out and throw them forward as if reaching, to dip them
as the blade of an oar is dipped at an angle, without loud
splashing;--and he showed her also how to use her feet. She learned
rapidly and astonishingly well. In less than two months Feliu felt
really proud at the progress made by his tiny pupil: it was a delight
to watch her lifting her slender arms above the water in swift, easy
curves, with the same fine grace that marked all her other natural
motions. Later on he taught her not to fear the sea even when it
growled a little,--how to ride a swell, how to face a breaker, how to
dive. She only needed practice thereafter; and Carmen, who could also
swim, finding the child's health improving marvellously under this new
discipline, took good care that Chita should practice whenever the
mornings were not too cold, or the water too rough.
With the first thrill of delight at finding herself able to glide over
the water unassisted, the child's superstitious terror of the sea
passed away. Even for the adult there are few physical joys keener
than the exultation of the swimmer;--how much greater the same glee as
newly felt by an imaginative child,--a child, whose vivid fancy can
lend unutterable value to the most insignificant trifles, can transform
a weed-patch to an Eden! ... Of her own accord she would ask for her
morning bath, as soon as she opened her eyes;--it even required some
severity to prevent her from remaining in the water too long. The sea
appeared to her as something that had become tame for her sake,
something that loved her in a huge rough way; a tremendous playmate,
whom she no longer feared to see come bounding and barking to lick her
feet. And, little by little, she also learned the wonderful healing
and caressing power of the monster, whose cool embrace at once
dispelled all drowsiness, feverishness, weariness,--even after the
sultriest nights when the air had seemed to burn, and the mosquitoes
had filled the chamber with a sound as of water boiling in many
kettles. And on mornings when the sea was in too wicked a humor to be
played with, how she felt the loss of her loved sport, and prayed for
calm! Her delicate constitution changed;--the soft, pale flesh became
firm and brown, the meagre limbs rounded into robust symmetry, the thin
cheeks grew peachy with richer life; for the strength of the sea had
entered into her; the sharp breath of the sea had renewed and
brightened her young blood....
... Thou primordial Sea, the awfulness of whose antiquity hath stricken
all mythology dumb;--thou most wrinkled diving Sea, the millions of
whose years outnumber even the multitude of thy hoary motions;--thou
omniform and most mysterious Sea, mother of the monsters and the
gods,--whence shine eternal youth? Still do thy waters hold the
infinite thrill of that Spirit which brooded above their face in the
Beginning!--still is thy quickening breath an elixir unto them that
flee to thee for life,--like the breath of young girls, like the breath
of children, prescribed for the senescent by magicians of
old,--prescribed unto weazened elders in the books of the Wizards.