CHAPTER V.—AT MARTINIQUE
THE lure of the Sea and of the Unknown was upon Hearn during the entire stay at New Orleans. How deeply it entered his heart is shown in a fragment rescued by his friend, Dr. Matas, which has been kindly sent me. The copy is in print, but when and where it was published we have been unable to learn. It was probably written in 1885 or 1886. As it gives glimpses at once into Hearn's mind, of his fateful desire to roam, of his Nature-love, and, better, of his growing mastery of technic and imagery, I reproduce herewith the fragment, which he entitled:
GULF WINDS
Golden oranges piled up in bins,—apples of the Southern Hesperides;—a medley of meridional tongues,—silky Latin tongues and their silkier patois; Chinese buyers yellow as bananas, quadroons with skin like dead gold; swarthy sailors from the Antilles; sharp odours of fruit freshly disembarked;—all the semi-tropical sights and sounds of the French market. I stood beside an orange-bin; and priced the fruit. Fifty cents a hundred! While wondering how much the fruit-vender's profit could possibly be, I was insensibly attracted by something unusual in his face—a shadow of the beauty of the antique world seemed to rest upon it. "Are you not a Greek?" I asked, for there was no mistaking the metoposcopy of that head. Yes; he was from Zante—first a sailor, now a fruit-vender; some day, perhaps, he would be a merchant.
It is among those who sell, not among those who buy, that the most curious studies of human nature and of the human face are to be made in the French market. These dealers are by no means usually French, but they are mostly from the Mediterranean coasts and the Levant—from Sicily and Cyprus, Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred cities fringing the coasts of Southern Europe. They are wanderers, who have wandered all over the face of the earth to find rest at last in this city of the South; they are sailors who have sailed all seas, and sunned themselves at a hundred tropical ports, and finally anchored their lives by the levee of New Orleans. The Neapolitan Italian, the Spaniard, the Corsican, the Levantine Greek, seek rest from storm here, in a clime akin to their own and under a sky as divinely blue, and at a port not far distant from their beloved sea. For these Levantine sailors hate dusty inland cities and the dry air of the Great West.
If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the sea;—if, in early childhood, you listened each morning and evening to that most ancient and mystic hymn-chant of the waves, which none can hear without awe, and which no musician can learn;—if you have ever watched wonderingly the far sails of the fishing-vessels turn rosy in the blush of sunset, or silver under the moon, or golden in the glow of sunrise;—if you once breathed as your native air the divine breath of the ocean, and learned the swimmer's art from the hoary breakers, and received the Ocean-god's christening, the glorious baptism of salt,—then, perhaps, you know only too well why these sailors of the Levant cannot seek homes within the heart of the land. Twenty years may have passed since your ears last caught the thunder of that mighty ode of hexameters which the sea has always sung and will sing forever, since your eyes sought the far line where the vaulted blue of heaven touches the level immensity of rolling water,—since you breathed the breath of the ocean, and felt its clear ozone living in your veins like an elixir. Have you forgotten the mighty measure of that mighty song? have you forgotten the divine saltiness of that unfettered wind? Is not the spell of the sea strong upon you still?
So that when the long, burning summer comes, and the city roars dustily around you, and your ears are filled with the droning hum of machinery, and your heart full of the bitterness of the struggle for life, there comes to you at long intervals in the dingy office or the crowded street some memory of white breakers and vast stretches of wrinkled sand and far-fluttering breezes that seem to whisper, "Come!"
So that when the silent night comes,—you find yourself revisiting in dreams those ocean-shores thousands of miles away. The wrinkled sand, ever shifting yet ever the same, has the same old familiar patches of vari-coloured weeds and shining rocks along its level expanse: and the thunder-chant of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever new, is rolling up to heaven. The glad waves leap up to embrace you; the free winds shout welcome in your ears; white sails are shining in the west; white sea-birds are flying over the gleaming swells. And from the infinite expanse of eternal sky and everlasting sea, there comes to you, with the heavenly ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a delicious feeling as of life renewed, an ecstasy as of life restored. And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder of that sea-dream in your ears and tears of regret in your eyes to find about you only heat and dust and toil; the awakening rumble of traffic, and "the city sickening on its own thick breath."
And I think that the Levantine sailors dare not dwell in the midst of the land, for fear lest dreams of a shadowy sea might come upon them in the night, and phantom winds call wildly to them in their sleep, and they might wake to find themselves a thousand miles beyond the voice of the breakers.
Sometimes, I doubt not, these swarthy sellers of fruit, whose black eyes sparkle with the sparkle of the sea, and whose voices own the tones of ocean-winds, sicken when a glorious breeze from the Gulf enters the city, shaking the blossoms from the magnolia-trees and the orange-groves. Sometimes, I doubt not, they forsake their Southern home when the dream comes upon them, and take ship for the Spanish Main. Yet I think most men may wake here from the dreams of the sea, and rest again. It is true that you cannot hear the voice of the hoary breakers in the moonlight,—only the long panting of the cotton-presses, the shouting of the boats calling upon each other through the tropical night, and the ceaseless song of night-birds and crickets. But the sea-ships, with their white wings folded, are slumbering at the wharves; the sea-winds are blowing through the moon-lit streets, and from the South arises a wondrous pale glow, like the far reflection of the emerald green of the ocean. So that the Greek sailor, awaking from the vision of winds and waves, may join three fingers of his right hand, after the manner of the Eastern Church, and cross himself, and sleep again in peace.
Hearn left New Orleans in July, 1887, and was soon settled at St. Pierre, Martinique. His letters to Dr. Matas form the principal sources of information concerning himself and his work during his stay there. From them I choose a few selections which bear upon his literary labours. At first, of course, all is perfection:
I am absolutely bewitched, and resolved to settle down somewhere in the West Indies. Martinique is simply heaven on earth. You must imagine a community whose only vices are erotic. There are no thieves, no roughs, no snobs. Everything is primitive and morally pure—except in the only particular where purity would be out of harmony with natural conditions. As for the climate, it is divine—though this is the worst season.
And I have begun to hate all that is energetic, swift, rapid in thought or action, all rivalry, all competition, all striving in the race of success. It is just enough to live here: no, it is too much!—it is more than any ordinary human being deserves to enjoy. It makes one feel like crying for joy just to look about one.
Couldn't I induce you to abandon the beastly civilization of the U. S., and live somewhere down here forever more,—where everybody is honest and good-natured and courteous, and where everything is divine? Man was not intended to work in this part of the world: while you are here, you cannot quite persuade yourself you are awake,—it is a dream of eternal beauty,—all the musky winds, all the flower-months of Paradise! New Orleans is the most infernal hole in the entire Cosmos. Don't live in it! Confound fame and wealth and reputation and splendour. You don't need any of these things here; they are superfluous; they are obsolete; they are nuisances; they are living curses. Settle here. Humming-birds will fly into your chamber to wake you up. What on earth you can find to live for in the U.S. I am now at a loss to see. You'll get old there;—here you will remain eternally young: the palms distil Elixir Vitæ.
But it is simply foolishness to write to you—because I can't write about this place. All ambition to write has been paralyzed—let Nature do the writing—in green, azure and gold!
Lafcadio Hearn.
From a Photograph taken at Martinique, August 24th, 1888.