Do you get Mélusine yet? You are missing a great deal if you are not. Mélusine is preserving all those curious peasant songs with their music,—some of which date back hundreds of years. They would be a delightful relish to you.
Yours à jamais,
L. Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1877.
“O-me-taw-Boodh!”—Have I not indeed been much bewitched by thine exotic comedy, which hath the mild perfume and yellow beauty of a Chinese rose? Assuredly I have been enchanted by the Eastern fragrance of thy many-coloured brochure; for mine head “is not as yellow as mud.” In thy next epistle, however, please to enlighten my soul in regard to the mystic title-phrase,—“Remodelled from the original English;“ for I have been wearing out the iron shoes of patience in my vain endeavour to comprehend it. What I most desired, while perusing the play, was that I might have been able to hear the musical interludes,—the barbaric beauty of the melodies,—and the plaintive sadness of thy serpent-skinned instruments. I shall soon return the MSS. to thy hands.
By the bye, did you ever hear a real Chinese gong? I don’t mean a d—d hotel gong, but one of those great moon-disks of yellow metal which have so terrible a power of utterance. A gentleman in Bangor, North Wales, who had a private museum of South Pacific and Chinese curiosities, exhibited one to me. It was hanging amidst Fiji spears beautifully barbed with shark’s teeth, which, together with grotesque New Zealand clubs of green stone and Sandwich Island paddles wrought with the baroque visages of the Shark-God, were depending from the walls. Also there were Indian elephants in ivory, carrying balls in their carven bellies, each ball containing many other balls inside it. The gong glimmered pale and huge and yellow, like the moon rising over a Southern swamp. My friend tapped its ancient face with a muffled drumstick, and it commenced to sob, like waves upon a low beach. He tapped it again, and it moaned like the wind in a mighty forest of pines. Again, and it commenced to roar, and with each tap the roar grew deeper and deeper, till it seemed like thunder rolling over an abyss in the Cordilleras, or the crashing of Thor’s chariot wheels. It was awful, and astonishing as awful. I assure you I did not laugh at it at all. It impressed me as something terrible and mysterious. I vainly sought to understand how that thin, thin disk of trembling metal could produce so frightful a vibration. He informed me that it was very expensive, being chiefly made of the most precious metals,—silver and gold.
Let me give you a description of my new residence. I never knew what the beauty of an old Creole home was until now. I do not believe one could find anything more picturesque outside of Venice or Florence. For six months I had been trying to get a room in one of these curious buildings; but the rents seemed to me maliciously enormous. However, I at last obtained one for $3 per week. Yet it is on the third floor, rear building;—these old princes of the South built always double edifices, covering an enormous space of ground, with broad wings, courtyards, and slave quarters.
The building is on St. Louis Street, a street several hundred years old. I enter by a huge archway about a hundred feet long,—full of rolling echoes, and commencing to become verdant with a thin growth of bright moss. At the end, the archway opens into a court. There are a few graceful bananas here with their giant leaves splitting in ribbons in the summer sun, so that they look like young palms. Lord! How the carriages must have thundered under that archway and through the broad paved court in the old days. The stables are here still; but the blooded horses are gone, and the family carriage, with its French coat of arms, has disappeared. There is only a huge wagon left to crumble to pieces. A hoary dog sleeps like a stone sphinx at a corner of the broad stairway; and I fancy that in his still slumbers he might be dreaming of a Creole master who went out with Beauregard or Lee and never came back again. Wonder if the great greyhound is waiting for him.