The dog never notices me. I am not of his generation, and I creep quietly by lest I might disturb his dreams of the dead South. I go up the huge stairway. At every landing a vista of broad archways reëchoes my steps—archways that once led to rooms worthy of a prince. But the rooms are now cold and cheerless and vast with emptiness. Tinted in pale green or yellow, with a ceiling moulded with Renaissance figures in plaster, the ghost of luxury and wealth seems trying to linger in them. I pass them by, and taking my way through an archway on the right, find myself on a broad piazza, at the end of which is my room.
It is vast enough for a Carnival ball. Five windows and glass doors open flush with the floor and rise to the ceilings. They open on two sides upon the piazza, whence I have a far view of tropical gardens and masses of building, half-ruined but still magnificent. The walls are tinted pale orange colour; green curtains drape the doors and windows; and the mantelpiece, surmounted by a long oval mirror of Venetian pattern, is of white marble veined like the bosom of a Naiad. In the centre of the huge apartment rises a bed as massive as a fortress, with tremendous columns of carved mahogany supporting a curtained canopy at the height of sixteen feet. It seems to touch the ceiling, yet it does not. There is no carpet on the floor, no pictures on the wall,—a sense of something dead and lost fills the place with a gentle melancholy;—the breezes play fantastically with the pallid curtains, and the breath of flowers ascends into the chamber from the verdant gardens below. Oh, the silence of this house, the perfume, and the romance of it. A beautiful young Frenchwoman appears once a day in my neighbourhood to arrange the room; but she comes like a ghost and disappears too soon in the recesses of the awful house. I would like to speak with her, for her lips drop honey, and her voice is richly sweet like the cooing of a dove. “O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret hiding-places of the stairs, let me see thy face, let me hear thy voice, for thy voice is sweet and thy countenance is comely!”
Let me tell thee, O Bard of the Harp of a Thousand Strings, concerning a Romance of Georgia. I heard of it among the flickering shadow of steamboat smoke and the flapping of sluggish sails. It has a hero greater, I think, than Bludso; but his name is lost. At least it is lost in Southern history; yet perhaps it may be recorded on the pages of a great book whose leaves never turn yellow with Time, and whose letters are eternal as the stars. But the reason his name is not known is because he was a “d—d nigger.”
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1878.
My dear Musician,—I wrote you such a shabby, disjointed letter last week that I feel I ought to make up for it,—especially after your newsy, fresh, pleasant letter to me, which came like a cool Northern breeze speaking of life, energy, success, and strong hopes.
I am very much ashamed that I have not yet been able to keep all my promises to you. There is that Creole music I had hoped to get copied by Saturday, and could not succeed in obtaining. But it is only delayed, I assure you; and New Orleans is going to produce a treat for you soon. George Cable, a charming writer, some of whose dainty New Orleans stories you may have read in Scribner’s Monthly, is writing a work containing a study of Creole music, in which the songs are given, with the musical text in footnotes. I have helped Cable a little in collecting the songs; but he has the advantage of me in being able to write music by ear. Scribner will publish the volume. This is not, of course, for publicity.
My new journalistic life may interest you,—it is so different from anything in the North. I have at last succeeded in getting right into the fantastic heart of the French quarter, where I hear the antiquated dialect all day long. Early in the morning I visit a restaurant, where I devour a plate of figs, a cup of black coffee, a dish of cream-cheese,—not the Northern stuff, but a delightful cake of pressed milk floating in cream,—a couple of corn muffins, and an egg. This is a heavy breakfast here, but costs only about twenty-five cents. Then I slip down to the office, and rattle off a couple of leaders on literary or European matters and a few paragraphs based on telegraphic news. This occupies about an hour. Then the country papers,—half French, half English,—altogether barbarous, come in from all the wild, untamed parishes of Louisiana. Madly I seize the scissors and the paste-pot and construct a column of crop-notes. This occupies about half an hour. Then the New York dailies make their appearance. I devour their substance and take notes for the ensuing day’s expression of opinion. And then the work is over, and the long golden afternoon welcomes me forth to enjoy its perfume and its laziness. It would be a delightful existence for one without ambition or hope of better things. On Sunday the brackish Lake Pontchartrain offers the attraction of a long swim, and I like to avail myself of it. Swimming in the Mississippi is dangerous on account of great fierce fish, the alligator-gars, which attack a swimmer with ferocity. An English swimmer was bitten by one only the other day in the river, and, losing his presence of mind, was swept under a barge and drowned.
Folks here tell me now that I have been sick I have nothing more to fear, and will soon be acclimatized. If acclimatization signifies becoming a bundle of sharp bones and saddle-coloured parchment, I have no doubt of it at all. It is considered dangerous here to drink much water in summer. For five cents one can get half a bottle of strong claret, and this you mix with your drinking water, squeezing a lemon into it. Limes are better, but harder to get,—you can only buy them when schooners come in from the Gulf islands. But no one knows how delicious lemonade can be made until he has tasted lemonade made of limes.
I saw a really pleasing study for an artist this morning. A friend accompanied me to the French market, and we bought an enormous quantity of figs for about fifteen cents. We could not half finish them; and we sought rest under the cool, waving shadow of a eunuch banana-tree in the Square. As I munched and munched a half-naked boy ran by,—a fellow that would have charmed Murillo, with a skin like a new cent in colour, and heavy masses of hair massed as tastefully as if sculptured in ebony. I threw a fig at him and hit him in the back. He ate it, and coolly walked toward us with his little bronze hands turned upward and opened to their fullest capacity, and a pair of great black eyes flashed a request for more. You never saw such a pair of eyes,—deep and dark,—a night without a moon. Spoke to him in English,—no answer; in French,—no response. My friend bounced him with Spak-ne Italiano, or something of that kind, but it was no good. We asked him by signs where he came from, and he pointed to a rakish lugger rocking at the Picayune pier. I filled his little brown hands with figs, but he did not smile. He gravely thanked us with a flash of the eye like a gleam of a black opal, and murmured, “Ah, mille gratias, Señor.” Why, that boy was Murillo’s boy after all, propria persona. He departed to the rakish lugger, and we dreamed of Moors and gipsies under the emasculated banana.