Summer Cruising in the South Seas

by Charles Warren Stoddard

I don't know what possessed me at that moment. I felt an almost uncontrollable desire to laugh, as though it were some masque gotten up for my amusement. Then I wished they would cease their masking, for I felt too miserable to laugh. Then I was utterly at a loss to know what to do; so I walked to the old-fashioned bed—our old-fashioned bed—in the corner, looking just as it used to. I think the same old spider was there still, clinging to the canopy; the very same old fellow, in his harlequin tights, that we used to watch, and talk about, and wonder what he was thinking of, to stop so still, day after day, and week after week, up there on the canopy. I threw myself upon the edge of the bed, my feet resting upon the floor; and there I tried to think of everything but that one dreadful reality that would assert itself, in spite of my efforts to deny it.

Where was my friend? Where could he be, that these, his friends, were so bowed with sorrow? The question involved a revelation, already anticipated in my mind. That revelation I dreaded as I would dread my own death-sentence. But it came at last. A woman who had been humbling herself in the dust moved toward me from the shadow that half concealed her. She did not rise to her feet; she was half reclining on the mats of the floor, her features veiled in the long, black hair of her race. One hand was extended toward me, then the other; the body followed; and so she moved, slowly and painfully, toward the bedside.

It was his mother. I knew her intuitively. Close to the bed she came, and crouched by me, upon the floor. There, with one hand clasped close over mine, the other flooded with her copious tears, and her forehead bowed almost to the floor, she poured forth the measure of her woe. The moment her voice was heard, those out of the house ceased wailing, and seemed to be listening to the elegy of the bereaved.

Her voice was husky with grief, broken again and again with sobs. I seemed to understand perfectly the nature of her story, though my knowledge of the dialect was very deficient.

The mother's soul was quickened with her pathetic theme. The frenzy of the poet inspired her lips. It was an epic she was chanting, celebrating the career of her boy-hero. She told of his birth, and wonderful childhood; of his beautiful strength; of his sublime affection, and the friend it had brought him from over the water.

She referred frequently to our former associations, and seemed to delight in dwelling upon them. Then came the story of his death,—the saddest canto of the melancholy whole.

How shall I ever forgive myself the selfish pleasure I took in striving to remodel an immortal soul? What business had I to touch so sensitive an organism; susceptible of infinite impressions, but incapable, in its prodigality, of separating and dismissing the evil, and retaining only the good,—therefore fit only to increase and develop in the suitable atmosphere with which the Creator had surrounded it?

Why did I not foresee the climax?

I might have known that one reared in the nursery of Nature, as free to speak and act as the very winds of heaven to blow whither they list, could ill support the manacles of our modern proprieties. Of what use to him could be a knowledge of the artifices of society? Simply a temptation and a snare!

What was the story of his fate? That he came safely home, rejoicing in his natural freedom; that he could not express his delight at finding home so pleasant; that his days were spent in telling of the wonderful things he had seen: more sects than the gods of the South Seas; more doubters than believers; contradictions, and insults, and suspicions everywhere. They laughed again, when they thought of us, and pitied us all the while.