Chita-A Memory of Last Island [22]
toward him the least selfish side of their natures,--had made with him a tolerably equitable exchange of ideas and of favors; and after his disappearance from their midst, they had duly mourned for his loss--to themselves! They had played out the final act in the unimportant drama of his life: it was really asking too much to demand a repetition ... Impossible to deceive himself as to the feeling his unanticipated return had aroused:--feigned pity where he had looked for sympathetic welcome; dismay where he had expected surprised delight; and, oftener, airs of resignation, or disappointment ill disguised,--always insincerity, politely masked or coldly bare. He had come back to find strangers in his home, relatives at law concerning his estate, and himself regarded as an intruder among the living,--an unlucky 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 of that stone were not a lie!--would to kind God he also were dead! ...
Evening shadowed: the violet deepened and prickled itself with stars;---the sun passed below the west, leaving in his wake a momentary splendor of vermilion ... our Southern day is not prolonged by gloaming. And Julien's thoughts darkened with the darkening, and as swiftly. For while there was yet light to see, he read another name that he used to know--the name of RAMIREZ ... Nacio en Cienfuegos, isla de Cuba ... Wherefore born?--for what eternal purpose, Ramirez,--in the City of a Hundred Fires? He had blown out his brains before the sepulchre of his young wife ... It was a detached double vault, shaped like a huge chest, and much dilapidated already:--under the continuous burrowing of the crawfish it had sunk greatly on one side, tilting as if about to fall. Out from its zigzag fissurings of brick and plaster, a sinister voice seemed to come:--"Go thou and do likewise! ... Earth groans with her burthen even now,--the burthen of Man: she holds no place for thee!"
VIII.
... 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
Evening shadowed: the violet deepened and prickled itself with stars;---the sun passed below the west, leaving in his wake a momentary splendor of vermilion ... our Southern day is not prolonged by gloaming. And Julien's thoughts darkened with the darkening, and as swiftly. For while there was yet light to see, he read another name that he used to know--the name of RAMIREZ ... Nacio en Cienfuegos, isla de Cuba ... Wherefore born?--for what eternal purpose, Ramirez,--in the City of a Hundred Fires? He had blown out his brains before the sepulchre of his young wife ... It was a detached double vault, shaped like a huge chest, and much dilapidated already:--under the continuous burrowing of the crawfish it had sunk greatly on one side, tilting as if about to fall. Out from its zigzag fissurings of brick and plaster, a sinister voice seemed to come:--"Go thou and do likewise! ... Earth groans with her burthen even now,--the burthen of Man: she holds no place for thee!"
VIII.
... 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