Chita: A Memory of Last Island

by Lafcadio Hearn

her in dreams, bending and smiling over her, caressingher, speaking to her,--sometimes gently chiding, but always chidingwith a kiss. And then the child would laugh in her sleep, and prattlein Creole,--talking to the luminous shadow, telling the dead mother allthe little deeds and thoughts of the day.... Why would God only let hercome at night?

  ... Her idea of God had been first defined by the sight of a quaintFrench picture of the Creation,--an engraving which represented ashoreless sea under a black sky, and out of the blackness a solemn andbearded gray head emerging, and a cloudy hand through which starsglimmered. God was like old Doctor de Coulanges, who used to visit thehouse, and talk in a voice like a low roll of thunder.... At a laterday, when Chita had been told that God was "everywhere at the same time"--without and within, beneath and above all things,--this idea becamesomewhat changed. The awful bearded face, the huge shadowy hand, didnot fade from her thought; but they became fantastically blended withthe larger and vaguer notion of something that filled the world andreached to the stars,--something diaphanous and incomprehensible likethe invisible air, omnipresent and everlasting like the high blue ofheaven ....

  II.

  ... She began to learn the life of the coast.

  With her acquisition of another tongue, there came to her also theunderstanding of many things relating to the world of the sea Shememorized with novel delight much that was told her day by dayconcerning the nature surrounding her,--many secrets of the air, manyof those signs of heaven which the dwellers in cities cannot comprehendbecause the atmosphere is thickened and made stagnant abovethem--cannot even watch because the horizon is hidden from their eyesby walls, and by weary avenues of trees with whitewashed trunks. Shelearned, by listening, by asking, by observing also, how to know thesigns that foretell wild weather:--tremendous sunsets, scuddings andbridgings of cloud,--sharpening and darkening of the sea-line,--and theshriek of gulls flashing to land in level flight, out of a stilltransparent 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 theirprey,--and where the beautiful wild-ducks, plumaged in satiny lilac andsilken green, found their food,--and where the best reeds grew tofurnish stems for Feliu's red-clay pipe,--and where the ruddy sea-beanswere most often tossed upon the shore,--and how the gray pelicansfished 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,--theproverbs about its deafness, its avarice, its treachery, its terrificpower,--especially one that haunted her for all time thereafter: Siquieres aprender a orar, entra en el mar (If thou wouldst learn topray, go to the sea). She learned why the sea is salt,--how "the tearsof women made the waves of the sea,"--and how the sea has ii nofriends,--and how the cat's eyes change with the tides.

  What had she lost of life by her swift translation from the dustyexistence of cities to the open immensity of nature's freedom? What didshe gain?

  Doubtless she was saved from many of those little bitternesses andrestraints and disappointments which all well-bred city children mustsuffer in the course of their training for the more or less factitiouslife of society:--obligations to remain very still with every nimblenerve quivering in dumb revolt;--the injustice of being foundtroublesome and being sent to bed early for the comfort of herelders;--the cruel necessity of straining her pretty eyes, for manylong hours at a time, over grimy desks in gloomy school-rooms, thoughbirds might twitter and bright winds flutter in the trees without;--theaustere constrains and heavy drowsiness of warm churches, filled withthe droning echoes of a voice preaching incomprehensible things;--theprogressively augmenting weariness of lessons in deportment, indancing, in music, in the impossible art of keeping her dressesunruffled and unsoiled. Perhaps she never had any reason to regret allthese.

  She went to sleep and awakened with the wild birds;--her life remainedas unfettered by formalities as her fine feet by shoes. ExceptingCarmen's old prayer-book,--in which she learned to read a little,--herchildhood passed without books,--also without pictures, withoutdainties, without music, without theatrical amusements. But she sawand heard and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens andthe earth, is yet eternally new and eternally young with the holinessof beauty,--eternally mystical and divine,--eternally weird: theunveiled magnificence of Nature's moods,--the perpetual poem hymned bywind and surge,--the everlasting splendor of the sky.

  She saw the quivering pinkness of waters curled by the breath of themorning--under the deepening of the dawn--like a far fluttering andscattering of rose-leaves of fire;--

  Saw the shoreless, cloudless, marvellous double-circling azure ofperfect summer days--twin glories of infinite deeps inter-reflected,while the Soul of the World lay still, suffused with a jewel-light, asof vaporized sapphire;--

  Saw the Sea shift color,--"change sheets,"--when the viewless Wizard ofthe 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 littlefish--the yearly massacre of migrating populations, nations ofsea-trout, driven from their element by terror;--and the winnowing ofshark-fins,--and the rushing of porpoises,--and the rising of thegrande-ecaille, like a pillar of flame,--and the diving and pitchingand fighting of the frigates and the gulls,--and the armored hordes ofcrabs swarming out to clear the slope after the carnage and the gorginghad been done;--

  Saw the Dreams of the Sky,--scudding mockeries of ridged foam,--andshadowy stratification of capes and coasts and promontories long-drawnout,--and imageries, multicolored, of mountain frondage, and sierraswhitening above sierras,--and phantom islands ringed around withlagoons of glory;--

  Saw the toppling and smouldering of cloud-worlds after the enormousconflagration of sunsets,--incandescence ruining into darkness; andafter it a moving and climbing of stars among the blacknesses,--likesearching lamps;--

  Saw the deep kindle countless ghostly candles as for mysteriousnight-festival,--and a luminous billowing under a black sky, andeffervescences of fire, and the twirling and crawling of phosphoricfoam;--

  Saw the mesmerism of the Moon;--saw the enchanted tides self-heaped inmuttering obeisance before her.

  Often she heard the Music of the Marsh through the night: an infinityof flutings and tinklings made by tiny amphibia,--like the low blowingof numberless little tin horns, the clanking of billions of littlebells;--and, at intervals, profound tones, vibrant and heavy, as of abass viol--the orchestra of the great frogs! And interweaving with itall, one continuous shrilling,--keen as the steel speech of a saw,--thestridulous telegraphy of crickets.

  But always,--always, dreaming or awake, she heard the huge blind Seachanting 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 inpieces,"--the Elohim--Word of the Sea! ...

  Unknowingly she came to know the immemorial sympathy of the mind withthe Soul of the World,--the melancholy wrought by its moods of gray,the reverie responsive to its vagaries of mist, the exhilaration of itsvast exultings--days of windy joy, hours of transfigured light.

  She felt,--even without knowing it,--the weight of the Silences, thesolemnities of sky and sea in these low regions where all things seemto dream--waters and grasses with their momentary wavings,--woodsgray-webbed with mosses that drip and drool,--horizons with theirdelusions of vapor,--cranes meditating in their marshes,--kitesfloating in the high blue.... Even the children were singularly quiet;and their play less noisy--though she could not have learned thedifference--than the play of city children. Hour after hour, the womensewed or wove in silence. And the brown men,--always barefooted,always wearing rough blue shirts,--seemed, when they lounged about thewharf on idle days, as if they had told each ot
her long ago all theyknew or could ever know, and had nothing more to say. They would stareat the flickering of the current, at the drifting of clouds andbuzzard:--seldom looking at each other, and always turning their blackeyes again, in a weary way, to sky or sea. Even thus one sees thehorses and the cattle of the coast, seeking the beach to escape thewhizzing flies;--all watch the long waves rolling in, and sometimesturn their heads a moment to look at one another, but always look backto the waves again, as if wondering at a mystery....

  How often she herself had wondered--wondered at the multiform changesof each swell as it came in--transformations of tint, of shape, ofmotion, that seemed to betoken a life infinitely more subtle than thestrange cold life of lizards and of fishes,--and sinister, andspectral. Then they all appeared to move in order,--according to onelaw or impulse;--each had its own voice, yet all sang one and the sameeverlasting song. Vaguely, as she watched them and listened to them,there came to her the idea of a