INTUITION
I was nineteen years old, and a stranger in the great strange world of America, and grievously tormented by grim realities. As I did not know how to face those realities, I tried to forget them as much as possible; and romantic dreams, daily nourished at a public library, helped me to forget. Next to this unpaid luxury of reading, my chief pleasure was to wander about the streets of the town, trying to find in passing faces—faces of girls—some realization of certain ideals. And I found an almost equal pleasure in looking at the photographs placed on display at the doors of photographers’ shops,—called, in that place and time, “galleries.” Picture-galleries they were indeed for me, during many, many penniless months.
One day, in a by-street, I discovered a new photographer’s shop; and in a glass case, at the entrance, I beheld a face the first sight of which left me breathless with wonder and delight,—a face incomparably surpassing all my dreams. It was the face of a young woman wearing, for head-dress, something that looked like an embroidered scarf; and this extraordinary head-dress might have been devised for the purpose of displaying, to artistic advantage, the singular beauty of the features. The gaze of the large dark eyes was piercing and calm; the aquiline curve of the nose was clear as the curve of a sword; the mouth was fine, but firm;—and, in spite of the sensitive delicacy of this face, there was a something accipitrine about it,—something sinister and superb, that made me think of a falcon.... For a long, long time I stood looking at it, and the more I looked, the more the splendid wonder of it seemed to grow—like a fascination. I thought that I would suffer much—ever so much!—for the privilege of worshipping the real woman. But who was she? I dared not ask the owner of the “gallery;” and I could not think of any other means of finding out.
I had one friend in those days,—the only fellow countryman whom I knew in that American town,—a man who had preceded me into exile by nearly forty years,—and to him I went. With all of my boyish enthusiasms he used to feel an amused sympathy; and when I told him about my discovery, he at once proposed to go with me to the photograph-shop.
For several moments he studied the picture in silence, knitting his grey brows with a puzzled expression. Then he exclaimed emphatically,—
“That is not an American.”
“What do you think of the face?” I queried, anxiously.
“It is a wonderful face,” he answered,—“a very wonderful face. But it is not an American, nor an English face.”
“Spanish?” I suggested. “Or Italian?”
“No, no,” he returned, very positively. “It is not a European face at all.”
“Perhaps a Jewess?”—I ventured.
“No; there are very beautiful Jewish faces,—but none like that.”
“Then what can it be?”
“I do not know;—there is some strange blood there.”
“How can you tell?” I protested.
“Why, I feel it;—I am quite sure of it.... But wait here a moment!—I know this photographer, and I shall ask him.”
And, to my delight, he went in.... Alas! the riddle was not to be solved so quickly as we had hoped. The owner of the picture said that he did not know whose portrait it was. He had bought it, with a number of other “stock-photographs,” from a wholesale dealer in photographic wares. It had been taken in Paris; but the card upon which it was now mounted did not bear the name of the French photographer.
Now my friend was a wanderer whose ties with England had been broken before I was born;—he knew the most surprising things about weird places and strange peoples, but had long ceased to feel any interest in the life of the mother country. For that reason, probably, the picture proved not less of a riddle to him than to me. The photographer was a young man who had never left his native state; and his stock-in-trade had been obtained, of course, through an agency. As for myself, I was hopelessly separated, by iron circumstances, from that ordered society which seeks its pleasures in art and music and drama. Otherwise, how easily might I have learned the name of the marvellous being who had cast that shadow! But many long years went by before I learned it.
I had then forgotten all about the picture. I was in a Southern city, hundreds of miles away; and I happened to be leaning on the counter of a druggist’s shop, talking to the druggist, when I suddenly perceived, in a glass case at my elbow, the very same enigmatic photograph. It had been pasted, as a label, on the lid of some box of cosmetic. And again there tingled, through all my blood, the same thrill of wonder and delight that I had felt as a boy, at the door of that photographer....
“Excuse me for interrupting you a moment,” I exclaimed;—“please tell me whose face is that.”
The druggist glanced at the photograph, and then smiled—as people smile at silly questions.
“Is it possible that you do not know?” he responded.
“I do not,” I said. “Years ago I saw that photograph and I could not find out whose picture it was.”
“You are joking!”
“Really I am not,” I said;—“and I very much want to know.”
Then he told me—but I need not repeat the name of the great tragédienne.... At once flashed back to me the memory of my old friend’s declaration:—“There is some strange blood there.” After all, he was right! In the veins of that wonderful woman ran the blood of Indian kings.
What drove him at the end of the two years to endeavour to reach Cincinnati, Ohio, is not clear. The only light to be gathered upon the subject is from the fifth part of the autobiographical fragments, which suggests that he made the journey in an emigrant train and had not money for food upon the way. After thirty years, the clearest memory of that dolorous pilgrimage was of the distress of being misunderstood by the friendly girl who pitied his sufferings. The record of it bears the title of