I
Sometimes, in that Gloaming that divides deep sleep from the awakening,—when out of the world of wavering memories the first thin fancies begin to soar, like neuroptera, rising on diaphanous wing from a waste of marsh-grasses,—there suddenly comes an old, old longing that stings thought into nervous activity with a sharp pain. The impression in the first moment of wakefulness might be likened to a sense of nostalgia,—but the nostalgia which is rather a world-sickness than a homesickness; there is something in it also resembling the vain regret for what has been left perhaps twenty-years' journey behind us, and has now become a tropical remembrance because we have traveled so far toward the Northern Circle of life. Yet the longing I refer to is more puissant and more subtle than these definable feelings are;—it has almost the force of an impulse; it has no real affinity with the recognizable Past; its visions are archipelagoes which never loomed for us over the heaving of any remembered seas; it is like an unutterable wish to flee away from the Present into the Unknown,—a beautiful unknown, radiant with impossible luminosities of azure and sun-gold! I do not know how to account for this impulse,—unless as an unexplained Something in Man corresponding to the instinct of migration in lower forms of life—especially in those happy winged creatures privileged to follow the perfumed Summer round about the world. And I think it comes to us usually either with the first lukewarm burst of spring, or with the windy glories of autumn. Nevertheless, in the morning it came, out of season, and remained with me, while I watched from the balcony birds and ships alike fleeting tropicward with many-colored wings outspread, and thought of a tame crane at home,—with one wing hopelessly maimed,—that used to cry out bitterly to processions of his wild kindred sailing above the city roofs on their way to other skies.
Why these longings for lands in which we shall never be?—why this desire for that azure into which we cannot soar?—whence our mysterious love for that tumultuous deep into whose emerald secrets we may never peer?—Can it be that through countless epochs of the immemorial phylogenesis of man,—through all those myriad changes suggested by the prenatal evolution of the human heart,—through all the slow marvelous transition from fish to mammal,—there have actually persisted impulses, desires, sensations, whereof the enigma may be fully interpreted by some new science only,—a future science of psychical dysteleology?...
So musing, I found my way to the Plaza.
Has it not often seemed to you that the more antiquated and the more unfamiliar an object or a place is, the more it appears at first sight to live,—to possess a sort of inner being, a fetish-spirit, a soul? I thought that morning the ancient Plaza had such a soul, and that it spoke to me in its mysterious dumb way, as if saying: 'Come look at me, because I am very, very old;—but do not look at the sulphur fountain which the Americans have made, nor at the monument they have built; for those are not of the centuries to which I belong.'
So I entered, and idled awhile among the palms that threw spidery shadows under the noon-light; and I deciphered the old inscription upon the coquina pillar:—'PLAZA DE LA CONSTITUCION...;'—paying little heed to the song of the artesian spring, and scarcely vouchsafing a furtive glance to the newer monument, which I saw was not artistic, not imposing, but naïve and almost cumbrous. Suddenly my indifferent eye noted a graven word which revealed that the newer structure had been erected by Love, and for Love's sake only. And then, all unexpectedly, the very artlessness of the monument touched me as with a voiceless reproach,—touched me like the artlessness of a face in tears: so much of tender pain revealed itself through the simplicity of the chiseled words, OUR DEAD,—through the commonplaceness of the inscription, 'Erected by the Ladies' Memorial Association.' Then I walked around the monument, perusing on each of its white faces the roll-call of the dead,—sons, brothers, lovers,—the names of your darlings, gentle women of Saint Augustine! I read them every one; carefully spelling out many a Spanish name of Andalusian origin: sonorous appellations holding in their syllables etymological suggestions of Arabian ancestry—names swarthy and beautiful as an Oriental face might be. And all the while, —dominating the perfume of blossoms, and the keen sweet scent of aromatic grasses,—the sulphureous smell of the Volcanic spring came to me grimly through the warm aureate air,—like an odor of battles!
There was a name upon that white stone which affected me in a singular way,—a name that by contrast with those dark Spanish ones seemed fair, blonde as gold! In someplace—at some time, I had known that name.—But where?—but when?
Even as a perfume may create for us the spectre of a vanished day, or as a melody may suddenly evoke for us the forgotten tone of some dear voice,—so may the sound or sight of a name momentarily revive for us all the faded colors of some memory-portrait so beautiful, so beloved, that we had become afraid to look at it, and had permitted innumerable spiders of Monotony to weave their tintless gauze before its face. But we have had experiences which are now so long dead and so profoundly sepultured in the Cemetery of Recollection that no mnemonic necromancy can lend them recognizable outline; they have become totally spiritualized, and reveal themselves only as faint wind-stirrings in the atmosphere of Thought.
Surely the experience connected in some vague way with that blonde name must have belonged to these:—the memory had been; for I knew the presence of its ghost; but viewless it obstinately remained.
It pursued me through the amber afternoon. By some inexplicable mental process I discovered that it had been also associated with an idea of death, a melancholy fancy, at the time, that I had heard or had seen it before.—But when?—but where did I first learn that name? ... Night came, but brought with it no answer to the enigma.