Walls are lemon-colour;—quaint balconies and lattices are green. Palm-trees rise from courts and gardens into a warm blue sky—indescribably blue—that appears almost to touch the feathery heads of them. And all things, within or without the yellow vista, are steeped in a sunshine electrically white,—in a radiance so powerful that it lends even to the pavements of basalt the glitter of silver ore.
Men wearing only white canvas trousers, and immense hats of bamboo-grass,—men naked to the waist, and muscled like sculptures,—pass noiselessly with barefoot stride. Some are very black; others are of strange and beautiful colours: there are skins of gold, of brown bronze, and of ruddy bronze. And women pass in robes of brilliant hue,—women of the colour of fruit: orange-colour, banana-colour,—women wearing turbans banded with just such burning yellow as bars the belly of a wasp. The warm thick air is sweet with scents of sugar and of cinnamon,—with odours of mangoes and of custard-apples, of guava-jelly and of fresh cocoanut milk.
—Into the amber shadow and cool moist breath of a great archway I plunge, to reach a court filled with flickering emerald and the chirrup of leaping water. There a little boy and a little girl run to meet me, with Creole cries of “Mi y!” Each takes one of my hands;—each holds up a beautiful brown cheek to kiss. In the same moment a voice, the father’s voice—deep and vibrant as the tone of a great bell—calls from an inner doorway, “Entrez donc, mon ami!” And with the large caress of that voice there comes to me such joy of sympathy, such sense of perfect peace, as Souls long-tried by fire might feel when passing the Gateway of Pearl....
But all this was and is not!... Never again will sun or moon shine upon the streets of that city;—never again will its ways be trodden;—never again will its gardens blossom ... except in dreams.
He was again in New York in 1889, occupied with the final proofs of “Chita” before its appearance in book form, preparing the West Indian book for the press, but in sore distress for money, and making a translation of Anatole France’s “Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard” in a few weeks by Herculean labour, in order to exist until he could earn something by his original work. The half-yearly payment of royalties imposed by publishers bears hardly on the author who must pay daily for the means to live. For a time he visited Dr. Gould in Philadelphia, but after his return to New York an arrangement was entered into with Harper and Brothers to go to Japan for the purpose of writing articles from there, after the manner of the West Indian articles, later to be made into a book. An artist was to accompany him to prepare the illustrations, and their route was by way of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
His last evening in New York was spent in the company of his dear friend Mr. Ellwood Hendrick, to whom many of the most valuable letters contained in the second volume were written, and on May 8, 1890, he left for the East—never again to return.
CHAPTER III
A MASTER-WORKMAN
It was characteristic of the oddity of Hearn’s whole life that his way to the Farthest East should have led through the Farthest West, and that his way to a land where one’s first impressions are of having strayed into a child’s world of faëry,—so elfishly frail and fantastically small that one almost fears to move lest a rude gesture might destroy a baby’s dear “make believe,”—should have led through plains as gigantic as empires, and mountain gorges vast as dreams.