Chita: A Memory of Last Island
Page 9
was she?--who was her Julien? ... When the Estelle and many othervessels had discharged their ghastly cargoes;--when the bereaved of theland had assembled as hastily as they might for the du y ofidentification;--when memories were strained almost to madness inresearch of names, dates, incidents--for the evocation of dead words,resurrection of vanished days, recollection of dear promises,--then, inthe confusion, it was believed and declared that the little corpsefound on the pelican island was the daughter of the wearer of thewedding ring: Adele La Brierre, nee Florane, wife of Dr. Julien LaBrierre, of New Orleans, who was numbered among the missing.
And they brought dead Adele back,--up shadowy river windings, overlinked brightnesses of lake and lakelet, through many a greenglimmering bayou,--to the Creole city, and laid her to rest somewherein the old Saint-Louis Cemetery. And upon the tablet recording hername were also graven the words--
.....................
Aussi a la memoire de son mari;
JULIEN RAYMOND LA BRIERRE, ne a la paroisse St. Landry, le 29 Mai; MDCCCXXVIII; et de leur fille, EULALIE, agee de 4 as et 5 mois,-- Qui tous perirent dans la grande tempete qui balaya L'Ile Derniere, le 10 Aout, MDCCCLVI ..... + ..... Priez pour eux!
VII.
Yet six months afterward the face of Julien La Brierre was seen againupon the streets of New Orleans. Men started at the sight of him, asat a spectre standing in the sun. And nevertheless the apparition casta shadow. People paused, approached, half extended a hand through oldhabit, suddenly checked themselves and passed on,--wondering theyshould have forgotten, asking themselves why they had so nearly made anabsurd mistake.
It was a February day,--one of those crystalline days of our snowlessSouthern winter, when the air is clear and cool, and outlines sharpenin the light as if viewed through the focus of a diamond glass;--and inthat brightness Julien La Brierre perused his own brief epitaph, andgazed upon the sculptured name of drowned Adele. Only half a year hadpassed since she was laid away in the high wall of tombs,--in thatstrange colonial columbarium where the dead slept in rows, behindsquared marbles lettered in black or bronze. Yet herresting-place,--in the highest range,--already seemed old. Under ourSouthern sun, the vegetation of cemeteries seems to spring into beingspontaneously--to leap all suddenly into luxuriant life! Microscopicmossy growths had begun to mottle the slab that closed her in;--overits face some singular creeper was crawling, planting tiny reptile-feetinto the chiselled letters of the inscription; and from the moist soilbelow speckled euphorbias were growing up to her,--and morningglories,--and beautiful green tangled things of which he did not knowthe name.
And the sight of the pretty lizards, puffing their crimson pouches inthe sun, or undulating athwart epitaphs, and shifting their color whenapproached, from emerald to ashen-gray;--the caravans of the ants,journeying to and from tiny chinks in the masonry;--the bees gatheringhoney from the crimson blossoms of the crete-de-coq, whose radiclessought sustenance, perhaps from human dust, in the decay ofgenerations:--all that rich life of graves summoned up fancies ofResurrection, Nature's resurrection-work--wondrous transformations offlesh, marvellous bans migration of souls! ... From some forgottencrevice of that tomb roof, which alone intervened between her and thevast light, a sturdy weed was growing. He knew that plant, as itquivered against the blue,--the chou-gras, as Creole children call it:its dark berries form the mockingbird's favorite food ... Might not itsroots, exploring darkness, have found some unfamiliar nutrimentwithin?--might it not be that something of the dead heart had risen topurple and emerald life--in the sap of translucent leaves, in the wineof the savage berries,--to blend with the blood of the WizardSinger,--to lend a strange sweetness to the melody of his wooing? ...
... Seldom, indeed, does it happen that a man in the prime of youth, inthe possession of wealth, habituated to comforts and the elegances oflife, discovers in one brief week how minute his true relation to thehuman aggregate,--how insignificant his part as one living atom of thesocial organism. Seldom, at the age of twenty-eight, has one been madeable to comprehend, through experience alone, that in the vast andcomplex Stream of Being he counts for less than a drop; and that, evenas the blood loses and replaces its corpuscles, without a variance inthe volume and vigor of its current, so are individual existenceseliminated and replaced in the pulsing of a people's life, with never apause in its mighty murmur. But all this, and much more, Julien hadlearned in seven merciless days--seven successive and terrible shocksof experience. The enormous world had not missed him; and his placetherein was not void--society had simply forgotten him. So long as hehad moved among them, all he knew for friends had performed their pettyaltruistic roles,--had discharged their small human obligations,--hadkept turned toward him the least selfish side of their natures,--hadmade with him a tolerably equitable exchange of ideas and of favors;and after his disappearance from their midst, they had duly mourned forhis loss--to themselves! They had played out the final act in theunimportant drama of his life: it was really asking too much to demanda repetition ... Impossible to deceive himself as to the feeling hisunanticipated return had aroused:--feigned pity where he had looked forsympathetic welcome; dismay where he had expected surprised delight;and, oftener, airs of resignation, or disappointment illdisguised,--always insincerity, politely masked or coldly bare. He hadcome back to find strangers in his home, relatives at law concerninghis estate, and himself regarded as an intruder among the living,--anunlucky guest, a revenant ... How hollow and selfish a world it seemed!And yet there was love in it; he had been loved in it, unselfishly,passionately, with the love of father and of mother, of wife and child... All buried!--all lost forever! ... Oh! would to God the story ofthat stone were not a lie!--would to kind God he also were dead! ...
Evening shadowed: the violet deepened and prickled itself withstars;--the sun passed below the west, leaving in his wake a momentarysplendor of vermilion ... our Southern day is not prolonged bygloaming. And Julien's thoughts darkened with the darkening, and asswiftly. For while there was yet light to see, he read another namethat he used to know--the name of RAMIREZ ... Nacio en Cienfuegos, islade Cuba ... Wherefore born?--for what eternal purpose, Ramirez,--in theCity of a Hundred Fires? He had blown out his brains before thesepulchre of his young wife ... It was a detached double vault, shapedlike a huge chest, and much dilapidated already:--under the continuousburrowing of the crawfish it had sunk greatly on one side, tilting asif about to fall. Out from its zigzag fissurings of brick and plaster,a sinister voice seemed to come:--"Go thou and do likewise! ... Earthgroans with her burthen even now,--the burthen of Man: she holds noplace for thee!"
VIII.
... That voice pursued him into the darkness of his chillyroom,--haunted him in the silence of his lodging. And then beganwithin 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 naturesmust wage in their own souls at least once--perhaps many times--intheir lives. Memory, in such moments, plays like an electricstorm;--all involuntarily he found himself reviewing his life.
Incidents long forgotten came back with singular vividness: he saw thePast as he had not seen it while it was the Present;--remembrances ofhome, recollections of infancy, recurred to him with terribleintensity,--the artless pleasures and the trifling griefs, the littlehurts and the tender pettings, the hopes and the anxieties of those wholoved him, the smiles and tears of slaves ... And his first Creolepony, a present from his father the day after he had proved himselfable to recite his prayers correctly in French, without onemispronunciation--without saying crasse for grace,--and yellow Michel,who taught him to swim and to fish and to paddle a pirogue;--and thebayou, with its wonder-world of turtles and birds and creepingthings;--and his German tutor, who could not pronounce the j;--and thesongs of the cane-fields,--strangely pleasing, full of quaverings andlong plaintive notes, like the call of the cranes ... Tou', tou' paysblanc! ... Afterward Camaniere had leased th
e place;--everything musthave 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,--somedebts, some follies; and the frequent fond letters from home to whichhe might have replied so much oftener;--Paris, where talent ismediocrity; Paris, with its thunders and its splendors and its seethingof passion;--Paris, supreme focus of human endeavor, with its madnessesof art, its frenzied striving to express the Inexpressible, itsspasmodic strainings to clutch the Unattainable, its soarings ofsoul-fire to the heaven of the Impossible ...
What a rejoicing there was at his return!--how radiant and level thelong Road of the Future seemed to open before him!--everywherefriends, prospects, felicitations. Then his first serious love;--andthe night of the ball at St. Martinsville,--the vision of light!Gracile as a palm, and robed at once so simply, so exquisitely inwhite, she had seemed to