I.
... More finely than any term in our tongue does the French word
_frisson_ express that faint shiver--as of a ghostly touch thrilling
from hair to feet--which intense pleasure sometimes gives, and which is
felt most often and most strongly in childhood, when the imagination is
still so sensitive and so powerful that one's whole being trembles
to the vibration of a fancy. And this electric word best expresses,
I think, that long thrill of amazed delight inspired by the first
knowledge of the tropic world,--a sensation of weirdness in beauty, like
the effect, in child-days, of fairy tales and stories of phantom isles.
For all unreal seems the vision of it. The transfiguration of all
things by the stupendous light and the strange vapors of the West Indian
sea,--the interorbing of flood and sky in blinding azure,--the sudden
spirings of gem-tinted coast from the ocean,--the iris-colors and
astounding shapes of the hills,--the unimaginable magnificence of
palms,--the high woods veiled and swathed in vines that blaze like
emerald: all remind you in some queer way of things half forgotten,--the
fables of enchantment. Enchantment it is indeed--but only the
enchantment of that Great Wizard, the Sun, whose power you are scarcely
beginning to know.
And into the life of the tropical city you enter as in dreams one enters
into the life of a dead century. In all the quaint streets--over whose
luminous yellow façades the beautiful burning violet of the sky appears
as if but a few feet away--you see youth good to look upon as ripe
fruit; and the speech of the people is soft as a coo; and eyes of brown
girls caress you with a passing look.... Love's world, you may have
heard, has few restraints here, where Nature ever seems to cry out, like
the swart seller of corossoles:--"_ça qui le doudoux?_"...
How often in some passing figure does one discern an ideal almost
realized, and forbear to follow it with untired gaze only when another,
another, and yet another, come to provoke the same aesthetic fancy,--to
win the same unspoken praise! How often does one long for artist's power
to fix the fleeting lines, to catch the color, to seize the whole exotic
charm of some special type!... One finds a strange charm even in the
timbre of these voices,--these half-breed voices, always with a tendency
to contralto, and vibrant as ringing silver. What is that mysterious
quality in a voice which has power to make the pulse beat faster, even
when the singer is unseen?... do only the birds know?
... It seems to you that you could never weary of watching this
picturesque life,--of studying the costumes, brilliant with butterfly
colors,--and the statuesque semi-nudity of laboring hundreds,--and the
untaught grace of attitudes,--and the simplicity of manners. Each day
brings some new pleasure of surprise;--even from the window of your
lodging you are ever noting something novel, something to delight the
sense of oddity or beauty.... Even in your room everything interests
you, because of its queerness or quaintness: you become fond of the
objects about you,--the great noiseless rocking-chairs that lull to
sleep;--the immense bed (_lit-à-bateau_) of heavy polished wood, with
its richly carven sides reaching down to the very floor;--and its
invariable companion, the little couch or _sopha_, similarly shaped
but much narrower, used only for the siesta;--and the thick red earthen
vessels (_dobannes_) which keep your drinking-water cool on the hottest
days, but which are always filled thrice between sunrise and sunset with
clear water from the mountain,--_dleau toutt vivant_, "all alive";--and
the _verrines_, tall glass vases with stems of bronze in which your
candle will burn steadily despite a draught;--and even those funny
little angels and Virgins which look at you from their bracket in the
corner, over the oil lamp you are presumed to kindle nightly in their
honor, however great a heretic you may be.... You adopt at once, and
without reservation, those creole home habits which are the result of
centuries of experience with climate,--abstention from solid food before
the middle of the day, repose after the noon meal;--and you find each
repast an experience as curious as it is agreeable. It is not at all
difficult to accustom oneself to green pease stewed with sugar, eggs
mixed with tomatoes, salt fish stewed in milk, palmiste pith made into
salad, grated cocoa formed into rich cakes, and dishes of titiri cooked
in oil,--the minuscule fish, of which a thousand will scarcely fill
a saucer. Above all, you are astonished by the endless variety of
vegetables and fruits, of all conceivable shapes and inconceivable
flavors.
And it does not seem possible that even the simplest little recurrences
of this antiquated, gentle home-life could ever prove wearisome by daily
repetition through the months and years. The musical greeting of
the colored child, tapping at your door before sunrise,--"_Bonjou',
Missié_,"--as she brings your cup of black hot coffee and slice of
corossole;--the smile of the silent brown girl who carries your meals
up-stairs in a tray poised upon her brightly coiffed head, and who
stands by while you dine, watching every chance to serve, treading
quite silently with her pretty bare feet;--the pleasant manners of
the _màchanne_ who brings your fruit, the _porteuse_ who delivers your
bread, the _blanchisseuse_ who washes your linen at the river,--and all
the kindly folk who circle about your existence, with their trays and
turbans, their _foulards_ and _douillettes_, their primitive grace
and creole chatter: these can never cease to have a charm for you. You
cannot fail to be touched also by the amusing solicitude of these good
people for your health, because you are a stranger: their advice about
hours to go out and hours to stay at home,--about roads to follow and
paths to avoid on account of snakes,--about removing your hat and
coat, or drinking while warm.... Should you fall ill, this solicitude
intensifies to devotion; you are tirelessly tended;--the good people
will exhaust their wonderful knowledge of herbs to get you well,--will
climb the mornes even at midnight, in spite of the risk of snakes and
fear of zombis, to gather strange plants by the light of a lantern.
Natural joyousness, natural kindliness, heart-felt desire to please,
childish capacity of being delighted with trifles,--seem characteristic
of all this colored population. It is turning its best side towards you,
no doubt; but the side of the nature made visible appears none the less
agreeable because you suspect there is another which you have not seen.
What kindly inventiveness is displayed in contriving surprises for you,
or in finding some queer thing to show you,--some fantastic plant,
or grotesque fish, or singular bird! What apparent pleasure in taking
trouble to gratify,--what innocent frankness of sympathy!... Childishly
beautiful seems the readiness of this tinted race to compassionate: you
do not reflect that it is also a savage trait, while the charm of its
novelty is yet upon you. No one is ashamed to shed tears for the death
of a pet animal; any mishap to a child creates excitement, and evokes an
immediate volunteering of services. And this compassionate sentiment is
often extended, in a semi-poetical way, even to inanimate objects. One
June morning, I remember, a three-masted schooner lying in the bay
took fire, and had to be set adrift. An immense crowd gathered on the
wharves; and I saw many curious manifestations of grief,--such grief,
perhaps, as an infant feels for the misfortune of a toy it imagines to
possess feeling, but not the less sincere because unreasoning. As the
flames climbed the rigging, and the masts fell, the crowd moaned as
though looking upon some human tragedy; and everywhere one could hear
such strange cries of pity as, "_Pauv' malhérè!_" (poor unfortunate),
"_pauv' diabe!_"... "_Toutt baggaïe-y pou allé, casse!_" (All its
things-to-go-with are broken!) sobbed a girl, with tears streaming down
her cheeks.... She seemed to believe it was alive....
... And day by day the artlessness of this exotic humanity touches you
more;--day by day this savage, somnolent, splendid Nature--delighting in
furious color--bewitches you more. Already the anticipated necessity
of having to leave it all some day--the far-seen pain of bidding it
farewell--weighs upon you, even in dreams.
II.
Reader, if you be of those who have longed in vain for a glimpse of that
tropic world,--tales of whose beauty charmed your childhood, and made
stronger upon you that weird mesmerism of the sea which pulls at the
heart of a boy,--one who had longed like you, and who, chance-led,
beheld at last the fulfilment of the wish, can swear to you that the
magnificence of the reality far excels the imagining. Those who know
only the lands in which all processes for the satisfaction of human
wants have been perfected under the terrible stimulus of necessity, can
little guess the witchery of that Nature ruling the zones of color and
of light. Within their primeval circles, the earth remains radiant and
young as in that preglacial time whereof some transmitted memory
may have created the hundred traditions of an Age of Gold. And the
prediction of a paradise to come,--a phantom realm of rest and perpetual
light: may this not have been but a sum of the remembrances and the
yearnings of man first exiled from his heritage,--a dream born of the
great nostalgia of races migrating to people the pallid North?...
... But with the realization of the hope to know this magical Nature you
learn that the actuality varies from the preconceived ideal otherwise
than in surpassing it. Unless you enter the torrid world equipped with
scientific knowledge extraordinary, your anticipations are likely to be
at fault. Perhaps you had pictured to yourself the effect of perpetual
summer as a physical delight,--something like an indefinite prolongation
of the fairest summer weather ever enjoyed at home. Probably you had
heard of fevers, risks of acclimatization, intense heat, and a swarming
of venomous creatures; but you may nevertheless believe you know what
precautions to take; and published statistics of climatic temperature
may have persuaded you that the heat is not difficult to bear. By that
enervation to which all white dwellers in the tropics are subject you
may have understood a pleasant languor,--a painless disinclination
to effort in a country where physical effort is less needed than
elsewhere,--a soft temptation to idle away the hours in a hammock, under
the shade of giant trees. Perhaps you have read, with eyes of faith,
that torpor of the body is favorable to activity of the mind, and
therefore believe that the intellectual powers can be stimulated and
strengthened by tropical influences:--you suppose that enervation will
reveal itself only as a beatific indolence which will leave the brain
free to think with lucidity, or to revel in romantic dreams.
III.
You are not at first undeceived;--the disillusion is long delayed.
Doubtless you have read the delicious idyl of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
(this is not Mauritius, but the old life of Mauritius was wellnigh the
same); and you look for idyllic personages among the beautiful humanity
about you,--for idyllic scenes among the mornes shadowed by primeval
forest, and the valleys threaded by a hundred brooks. I know not whether
the faces and forms that you seek will be revealed to you;--but you
will not be able to complain for the lack of idyllic loveliness in the
commonest landscape. Whatever artistic knowledge you possess will merely
teach you the more to wonder at the luxuriant purple of the sea, the
violet opulence of the sky, the violent beauty of foliage greens, the
lilac tints of evening, and the color-enchantments distance gives in
an atmosphere full of iridescent power,--the amethysts and agates, the
pearls and ghostly golds, of far mountainings. Never, you imagine,
never could one tire of wandering through those marvellous valleys,--of
climbing the silent roads under emeraldine shadow to heights from which
the city seems but a few inches long, and the moored ships tinier than
gnats that cling to a mirror,--or of swimming in that blue bay whose
clear flood stays warm through all the year. [51]
Or, standing alone, in some aisle of colossal palms, where humming-birds
are flashing and shooting like a showering of jewel-fires, you feel
how weak the skill of poet or painter to fix the sensation of that
white-pillared imperial splendor;--and you think you know why creoles
exiled by necessity to colder lands may sicken for love of their
own,--die of home-yearning, as did many a one in far Louisiana, after
the political tragedies of 1848....
... But you are not a creole, and must pay tribute of suffering to the
climate of the tropics. You will have to learn that a temperature of
90° Fahr. in the tropics is by no means the same thing as 90° Fahr. in
Europe or the United States;--that the mornes cannot be climbed with
safety during the hotter hours of the afternoon;--that by taking a long
walk you incur serious danger of catching a fever;--that to enter the
high woods, a path must be hewn with the cutlass through the creepers
and vines and undergrowth,--among snakes, venomous insects, venomous
plants, and malarial exhalations;--that the finest blown dust is full
of irritant and invisible enemies;--that it is folly to seek repose on
a sward, or in the shade of trees,--particularly under tamarinds. Only
after you have by experience become well convinced of these facts can
you begin to comprehend something general in regard to West Indian
conditions of life.
IV.
... Slowly the knowledge comes.... For months the vitality of a strong
European (the American constitution bears the test even better) may
resist the debilitating climate: perhaps the stranger will flatter
himself that, like men habituated to heavy labor in stifling
warmth,--those toiling in mines, in founderies in engine-rooms of ships,
at iron-furnaces,--so he too may become accustomed, without losing his
strength to the continuous draining of the pores, to the exhausting
force of this strange motionless heat which compels change of clothing
many times a day. But gradually he finds that it is not heat alone which
is debilitating him, but the weight and septic nature of an atmosphere
charged with vapor, with electricity, with unknown agents not less
inimical to human existence than propitious to vegetal luxuriance. If
he has learned those rules of careful living which served him well in a
temperate climate, he will not be likely to abandon them among his new
surroundings; and they will help him; no doubt,--particularly if he be
prudent enough to avoid the sea-coast at night, and all exposure to dews
or early morning mists, and all severe physical strain. Nevertheless,
he becomes slowly conscious of changes extraordinary going on within
him,--in especial, a continual sensation of weight in the brain, daily
growing, and compelling frequent repose;--also a curious heightening
of nervous sensibility to atmospheric changes, to tastes and odors, to
pleasure and pain. Total loss of appetite soon teaches him to follow the
local custom of eating nothing solid before mid-day, and enables him
to divine how largely the necessity for caloric enters into the
food-consumption of northern races. He becomes abstemious, eats
sparingly, and discovers his palate to have become oddly exacting--finds
that certain fruits and drinks are indeed, as the creoles assert,
appropriate only to particular physical conditions corresponding with
particular hours of the day. Corossole is only to be eaten in the
morning, after black coffee;--vermouth is good to drink only between the
hours of nine and half-past ten;--rum or other strong liquor only before
meals or after fatigue;--claret or wine only during a repast, and then
very sparingly,--for, strangely enough, wine is found to be injurious
in a country where stronger liquors are considered among the prime
necessaries of existence.
And he expected, at the worst, to feel lazy, to lose some physical
energy! But this is no mere languor which now begins to oppress him;--it
is a sense of vital exhaustion painful as the misery of convalescence:
the least effort provokes a perspiration profuse enough to saturate
clothing, and the limbs ache as from muscular overstrain;--the lightest
attire feels almost insupportable;--the idea of sleeping even under a
sheet is torture, for the weight of a silken handkerchief is discomfort.
One wishes one could live as a savage,--naked in the heat. One burns
with a thirst impossible to assuage--feels a desire for stimulants, a
sense of difficulty in breathing, occasional quickenings of the heart's
action so violent as to alarm. Then comes at last the absolute dread of
physical exertion. Some slight relief might be obtained, no doubt, by
resigning oneself forthwith to adopt the gentle indolent manners of the
white creoles, who do not walk when it is possible to ride, and never
ride if it is equally convenient to drive;--but the northern nature
generally refuses to accept this ultimate necessity without a protracted
and painful struggle.
... Not even then has the stranger fully divined the evil power of this
tropical climate, which remodels the characters of races within a couple
of generations,--changing the shape of the skeleton,--deepening
the cavities of the orbits to protect the eye from the flood of
light,--transforming the blood,--darkening the skin. Following upon the
nervous modifications of the first few months come modifications and
changes of a yet graver kind;--with the loss of bodily energy ensues a
more than corresponding loss of mental activity and strength. The whole
range of thought diminishes, contracts,--shrinks to that narrowest of
circles which surrounds the physical sell, the inner ring of merely
material sensation: the memory weakens appallingly;--the mind operates
faintly, slowly, incoherently,--almost as in dreams. Serious reading,
vigorous thinking, become impossible. You doze over the most important
project;--you fall fast asleep over the most fascinating of books.
Then comes the vain revolt, the fruitless desperate striving with this
occult power which numbs the memory and enchants the will. Against
the set resolve to think, to act, to study, there is a hostile rush of
unfamiliar pain to the temples, to the eyes, to the nerve centres of
the brain; and a great weight is somewhere in the head, always growing
heavier: then comes a drowsiness that overpowers and stupefies, like the
effect of a narcotic. And this obligation to sleep, to sink into coma,
will impose itself just so surely as you venture to attempt any mental
work in leisure hours, after the noon repast, or during the heat of the
afternoon. Yet at night you can scarcely sleep. Repose is made feverish
by a still heat that keeps the skin drenched with thick sweat, or by
a perpetual, unaccountable, tingling and prickling of the whole
body-surface. With the approach of morning the air grows cooler, and
slumber comes,--a slumber of exhaustion, dreamless and sickly; and
perhaps when you would rise with the sun you feel such a dizziness, such
a numbness, such a torpor, that only by the most intense effort can you
keep your feet for the first five minutes. You experience a sensation
that recalls the poet's fancy of death-in-life, or old stories of sudden
rising from the grave: it is as though all the electricity of will
had ebbed away,--all the vital force evaporated, in the heat of the
night....
V.
It might be stated, I think, with safety, that for a certain class of
invalids the effect of the climate is like a powerful stimulant,--a
tonic medicine which may produce astonishing results within a fixed
time,--but which if taken beyond that time will prove dangerous. After
a certain number of months, your first enthusiasm with your new
surroundings dies out;--even Nature ceases to affect the senses in the
same way: the _frisson_ ceases to come to you. Meanwhile you may have
striven to become as much as possible a part of the exotic life into
which you have entered,--may have adopted its customs, learned its
language. But you cannot mix with it mentally;--You circulate only as an
oil-drop in its current. You still feel yourself alone.
The very longest West Indian day is but twelve hours fifty-six
minutes;--perhaps your first dissatisfaction was evoked by the brevity
of the days. There is no twilight whatever; and all activity ceases with
sundown: there is no going outside of the city after dark, because of
snakes;--club life here ends at the hour it only begins abroad;--there
is no visiting of evenings; after the seven o'clock dinner, everyone
prepares to retire. And the foreigner, accustomed to make evening a time
for social intercourse, finds no small difficulty in resigning himself
to this habit of early retiring. The natural activity of a European
or American mind requires some intellectual exercise,--at least some
interchange of ideas with sympathetic natures; the hours during the
suspension of business after noon, or those following the closing of
offices at sunset, are the only ones in which busy men may find time
for such relaxation; and these very hours have been always devoted to
restorative sleep by the native population ever since the colony began.
Naturally, therefore, the stranger dreads the coming of the darkness,
the inevitable isolation of long sleepless hours. And if he seek those
solaces for loneliness which he was wont to seek at home,--reading,
study,--he is made to comprehend, as never before, what the absence of
all libraries, lack of books, inaccessibility of all reading-matter,
means for the man of the nineteenth century. One must send abroad to
obtain even a review, and wait months for its coming. And this
mental starvation gnaws at the brain more and more as one feels less
inclination and less capacity for effort, and as that single enjoyment,
which at first rendered a man indifferent to other pleasures,--the
delight of being alone with tropical Nature,--becomes more difficult to
indulge. When lethargy has totally mastered habit and purpose, and you
must at last confess yourself resigned to view Nature from your chamber,
or at best from a carriage window,--then, indeed, the want of all
literature proves a positive torture. It is not a consolation to
discover that you are an almost solitary sufferer,--from climate as
well as from mental hunger. With amazement and envy you see young girls
passing to walk right across the island and back before sunset, under
burdens difficult for a strong man to lift to his shoulder;--the same
journey on horseback would now weary you for days. You wonder of what
flesh and blood can these people be made,--what wonderful vitality
lies in those slender woman-bodies, which, under the terrible sun, and
despite their astounding expenditure of force, remain cool to the sight
and touch as bodies of lizards and serpents! And contrasting this savage
strength with your own weakness, you begin to understand better how
mighty the working of those powers which temper races and shape race
habits in accordance with environment.
... Ultimately, if destined for acclimatation, you will cease to suffer
from these special conditions; but ere this can be, a long period of
nervous irritability must be endured; and fevers must thin the blood,
soften the muscles, transform the Northern tint of health to a dead
brown. You will have to learn that intellectual pursuits can be
persisted in only at risk of life;--that in this part of the world
there is nothing to do but to plant cane and cocoa, and make rum,
and cultivate tobacco,--or open a magazine for the sale of Madras
handkerchiefs and _foulards_,--and eat, drink, sleep, perspire. You
will understand why the tropics settled by European races produce no
sciences, arts, or literature,--why the habits and the thoughts of
other centuries still prevail where Time itself moves slowly as though
enfeebled by the heat.
And with the compulsory indolence of your life, the long exacerbation
of the nervous system, will come the first pain of nostalgia,--the first
weariness of the tropics. It is not that Nature can become ever less
lovely to your sight; but that the tantalization of her dangerous
beauty, which you may enjoy only at a safe distance, exasperates at
last. The colors that at first bewitched will vex your eyes by their
violence;--the creole life that appeared so simple, so gentle, will
reveal dulnesses and discomforts undreamed of. You will ask yourself how
much longer can you endure the prodigious light, and the furnace heat
of blinding blue days, and the void misery of sleepless nights, and the
curse of insects, and the sound of the mandibles of enormous roaches
devouring the few books in your possession. You will grow weary of the
grace of the palms, of the gemmy colors of the ever-clouded peaks, of
the sight of the high woods made impenetrable by lianas and vines and
serpents. You will weary even of the tepid sea, because to enjoy it as a
swimmer you must rise and go out at hours while the morning air is
still chill and heavy with miasma;--you will weary, above all, of tropic
fruits, and feel that you would gladly pay a hundred francs for the
momentary pleasure of biting into one rosy juicy Northern apple.
VI.
--But if you believe this disillusion perpetual,--if you fancy the old
bewitchment has spent all its force upon you,--you do not know this
Nature. She is not done with you yet: she has only torpefied your
energies a little. Of your willingness to obey her, she takes no
cognizance;--she ignores human purposes, knows only molecules and their
combinations; and the blind blood in your veins,--thick with Northern
heat and habit,--is still in dumb desperate rebellion against her.
Perhaps she will quell this revolt forever,--thus:--
One day, in the second hour of the afternoon, a few moments after
leaving home, there will come to you a sensation such as you have never
known before: a sudden weird fear of the light.
It seems to you that the blue sky-fire is burning down into your
brain,--that the flare of the white pavements and yellow walls is
piercing somehow into your life,--creating an unfamiliar mental
confusion,--blurring out thought.... Is the whole world taking
fire?... The flaming azure of the sea dazzles and pains like a
crucible-glow;--the green of the mornes flickers and blazes in some
amazing way.... Then dizziness inexpressible: you grope with eyes shut
fast--afraid to open them again in that stupefying torrefaction,--moving
automatically,--vaguely knowing you must get out of the flaring and
flashing,--somewhere, anywhere away from the white wrath of the sun,
and the green fire of the hills, and the monstrous color of the
sea.... Then, remembering nothing, you find yourself in bed,--with an
insupportable sense of weight at the back of the head,--a pulse beating
furiously,--and a strange sharp pain at intervals stinging through your
eyes.... And the pain grows, expands,--fills all the skull,--forces you
to cry out, replaces all other sensations except a weak consciousness,
vanishing and recurring, that you are very sick, more sick than ever
before in all your life.
... And with the tedious ebbing of the long fierce fever, all the heat
seems to pass from your veins. You can no longer imagine, as before,
that it would be delicious to die of cold;--you shiver even with all the
windows closed;--you feel currents of air,--imperceptible to nerves in
a natural condition,--which shock like a dash of cold water, whenever
doors are opened and closed; the very moisture upon your forehead is
icy. What you now wish for are stimulants and warmth. Your blood has
been changed;--tropic Nature has been good to you: she is preparing you
to dwell with her.
... Gradually, under the kind nursing of those colored people,--among
whom, as a stranger, your lot will probably be cast,--you recover
strength; and perhaps it will seem to you that the pain of lying a
while in the Shadow of Death is more than compensated by this rare and
touching experience of human goodness. How tirelessly watchful,--how
naïvely sympathetic,--how utterly self-sacrificing these women-natures
are! Patiently, through weeks of stifling days and sleepless
nights,--cruelly unnatural to them, for their life is in the open
air,--they struggle to save without one murmur of fatigue, without
heed of their most ordinary physical wants, without a thought of
recompense;--trusting to their own skill when the physician abandons
hope,--climbing to the woods for herbs when medicines prove, without
avail. The dream of angels holds nothing sweeter than this reality of
woman's tenderness.
And simultaneously with the return of force, you may wonder whether
this sickness has not sharpened your senses in some extraordinary
way,--especially hearing, sight, and smell. Once well enough to
be removed without danger, you will be taken up into the mountains
somewhere,--for change of air; and there it will seem to you, perhaps,
that never before did you feel so acutely the pleasure of perfumes,--of
color-tones,--of the timbre of voices. You have simply been
acclimated.... And suddenly the old fascination of tropic Nature seizes
you again,--more strongly than in the first days;--the _frisson_ of
delight returns; the joy of it thrills through all your blood,--making a
great fulness at your heart as of unutterable desire to give thanks....
VII.
... My friend Felicien had come to the colony fresh from the region of
the Vosges, with the muscles and energies of a mountaineer, and cheeks
pink as a French country-girl's;--he had never seemed to me physically
adapted for acclimation; and I feared much for him on hearing of his
first serious illness. Then the news of his convalescence came to me as
a grateful surprise. But I did not feel reassured by his appearance the
first evening I called at the little house to which he had been removed,
on the brow of a green height overlooking the town. I found him seated
in a _berceuse_ on the veranda. How wan he was, and how spectral his
smile of welcome,--as he held out to me a hand that seemed all of bone!
... We chatted there a while. It had been one of those tropic days whose
charm interpenetrates and blends with all the subtler life of sensation,
and becomes a luminous part of it forever,--steeping all after-dreams
of ideal peace in supernal glory of color,--transfiguring all fancies of
the pure joy of being. Azure to the sea-line the sky had remained since
morning; and the trade-wind, warm as a caress, never brought even one
gauzy cloud to veil the naked beauty of the peaks.
And the sun was yellowing,--as only over the tropics he yellows to
his death. Lilac tones slowly spread through sea and heaven from the
west;--mornes facing the light began to take wondrous glowing color,--a
tone of green so fiery that it looked as though all the rich sap of
their woods were phosphorescing. Shadows blued;--far peaks took
tinting that scarcely seemed of earth,--iridescent violets and
purples interchanging through vapor of gold.... Such the colors of the
_carangue_, when the beautiful tropic fish is turned in the light, and
its gem-greens shift to rich azure and prism-purple.
Reclining in our chairs, we watched the strange splendor from the
veranda of the little cottage,--saw the peaked land slowly steep itself
in the aureate glow,--the changing color of the verdured mornes, and of
the sweep of circling sea. Tiny birds, bosomed with fire, were shooting
by in long curves, like embers flung by invisible hands. From far below,
the murmur of the city rose to us,--a stormy hum. So motionless we
remained that the green and gray lizards were putting out their heads
from behind the columns of the veranda to stare at us,--as if wondering
whether we were really alive. I turned my head suddenly to look at
two queer butterflies; and all the lizards hid themselves again.
_Papillon-lanmò_,--Death's butterflies,--these were called in the speech
of the people: their broad wings were black like blackest velvet;--as
they fluttered against the yellow light, they looked like silhouettes of
butterflies. Always through my memory of that wondrous evening,--when I
little thought I was seeing my friend's face for the last time,--there
slowly passes the black palpitation of those wings....
... I had been chatting with Felicien about various things which I
thought might have a cheerful interest for him; and more than once I
had been happy to see him smile.... But our converse waned.
The ever-magnifying splendor before us had been mesmerizing our
senses,--slowly overpowering our wills with the amazement of its beauty.
Then, as the sun's disk--enormous,--blinding gold--touched the lilac
flood, and the stupendous orange glow flamed up to the very zenith, we
found ourselyes awed at last into silence.
The orange in the west deepened into vermilion. Softly and very swiftly
night rose like an indigo exhalation from the land,--filling the
valleys, flooding the gorges, blackening the woods, leaving only the
points of the peaks a while to catch the crimson glow. Forests
and fields began to utter a rushing sound as of torrents, always
deepening,--made up of the instrumentation and the voices of numberless
little beings: clangings as of hammered iron, ringings as of dropping
silver upon a stone, the dry bleatings of the _cabritt-bois_, and the
chirruping of tree-frogs, and the _k-i-i-i-i-i-i_ of crickets. Immense
trembling sparks began to rise and fall among the shadows,--twinkling
out and disappearing all mysteriously: these were the fire-flies
awakening. Then about the branches of the _bois-canon_ black shapes
began to hover, which were not birds--shapes flitting processionally
without any noise; each one in turn resting a moment as to nibble
something at the end of a bough;--then yielding place to another, and
circling away, to return again from the other side...the _guimbos_, the
great bats.
But we were silent, with the emotion of sunset still upon us: that
ghostly emotion which is the transmitted experience of a race,--the sum
of ancestral experiences innumerable,--the mingled joy and pain
of a million years.... Suddenly a sweet voice pierced the
stillness,--pleading:--
--"_Pa combiné, chè!--pa combiné conm ça!_" (Do not think, dear!--do not
think like that!)
... Only less beautiful than the sunset she seemed, this slender
half-breed, who had come all unperceived behind us, treading soundlessly
with her slim bare feet.... "And you, Missié", she said to me, in a tone
of gentle reproach;--"you are his friend! why do you let him think? It
is thinking that will prevent him getting well."
_Combiné_ in creole signifies to think intently, and therefore to be
unhappy,--because, with this artless race, as with children, to
think intensely about anything is possible only under great stress of
suffering.
--"_Pa combiné,--non, chè_," she repeated, plaintively, stroking
Felicien's hair. "It is thinking that makes us old.... And it is time to
bid your friend good-night."...
--"She is so good," said Felicien, smiling to make her pleased;--"I
could never tell you how good. But she does not understand. She believes
I suffer if I am silent. She is contented only when she sees me laugh;
and so she will tell me creole stories by the hour to keep me amused, as
if I were a child."...
As he spoke she slipped an arm about his neck.
--"_Doudoux_," she persisted;--and her voice was a dove's coo,--"_Si ou
ainmein moin, pa combiné-non!_"
And in her strange exotic beauty, her savage grace, her supple caress,
the velvet witchery of her eyes,--it seemed to me that I beheld a
something imaged, not of herself, nor of the moment only,--a something
weirdly sensuous: the Spirit of tropic Nature made golden flesh, and
murmuring to each lured wanderer:--"_If thou wouldst love me, do not
think_"...