Chapter VII: Introduction (2)

The beautiful city! Ah! how well he remembered it! The mighty hills sleeping in their eternal winding-sheets of snow, the azure heaven and the bright lake rippled by mountain winds, the plaza and its familiar sights and sounds. Y porque? The question brought up all the old bright memories, and the present for the moment melted away, and the dream of a Mexican night rose in ghostliness before him.

He stood again within an ancient street, quaint with the quaintness of another century, and saw the great windows of the hospitable Spanish residence at which he had been so often received as a son. Again he heard the long chant of the sereno in the melancholy silence; again he saw the white stars glimmering like lamps above the towers of the cathedral. The windows were tall and large, and barred with bars of iron; and there were lights in one of them--flickering taper-lights that made moving shadows on the wall. And within the circle of the tapers, a young girl lay all in white with hands crossed upon her breast, and flowers in the dark hair. He remembered all with that terrible minuteness agony lends to observation--even how the flickering of the tapers played with the shadows of the silky eyelashes, making the lids seem to quiver, as though that heart, to which all his hopes and aims and love had been trusted, had not forever ceased to beat. Again the watchman solemnly chanted the hour of the night, with words of Spanish piety; and far in the distance that weird mountain which ancient Mexican fancy called "The White Lady," and modern popular imagination, "The Dead One," lay as a corpse with white arms crossed upon its bosom, in awful mockery of the eternal sleep.

A DREAM OF KITES[8]

Looking out into the clear blue of the night from one of those jutting balconies which constitute a summer luxury in the Creole city, the eye sometimes marks the thin black threads which the telegraph wires draw sharply against the sky. We observed last evening the infinitely extending lines of the vast web which the Electric Spider has spun about the world; and the innumerable wrecks of kites fluttering thereupon, like the bodies of gaudy flies--strange lines of tattered objects extending far into the horizon and tracking out the course of the electric messengers beyond the point at which the slender threads cease to remain visible.

How fantastic the forms of these poor tattered wrecks, when the uniform tint of night robs them of their color, and only defines their silhouettes against the sky!--some swinging to and fro wearily, like thin bodies of malefactors mummified by sunheat upon their gibbets--some wildly fluttering as in the agony of despair and death--some dancing grotesquely upon their perches like flying goblins--some like impaled birds, with death-stiffened wings, motionlessly attached to their wire snare, and glaring with painted eyes upon the scene below as in a stupor of astonishment at their untimely fate.

All these represented the destruction of childish ambitions--each the wreck of some boyish pleasure. Many were doubtless wept for, and dreamed of afterward regretfully on wet pillows. And stretching away into the paler blue of the horizon we looked upon the interminable hues of irregular dots they made against it and remembered that each little dot represented some little pang.

Then it was natural that we should meditate a little upon the vanity of the ways in which these childish losses had been borne. The little owners of the poor kites had hearts whose fibre differed more than that of the kites themselves. Some might weep, but some doubtless laughed with childish heroism, and soon forgot their loss; some doubtless thought the world was all askew, and that telegraph wires ought never to have been invented; some, considering critically the question of cause and effect, resolved as young philosophers to profit by their experience, and seek similar pleasures thereafter where telegraph wires ensnared not; while some, perhaps, profited not at all, but only made new kites and abandoned them to the roguish wind, which again traitorously delivered them up to the insatiable enemies of kites and birds.

Is it not said that the child is the father of the man?

And as we sat there in the silence with the stars burning in the purple deeps of the summer night above us, we dreamed of the kites which children of a larger growth fly in the face of heaven--toys of love and faith--toys of ambition and of folly--toys of grotesque resolve and flattering ideals--toys of vain dreams and vain expectation--the kites of human Hope, gaudy-colored or gray, richly tinseled or humbly simple--rising and soaring and tossing on the fickle winds of the world, only to become entangled at last in that mighty web of indissoluble and everlasting threads which the Weird Sisters spin for all of us.

HEREDITARY MEMORIES[9]

"I was observing," continued the Doctor, "that it very frequently happens that upon seeing or hearing something new for the first time--that is, something entirely new to us--we feel a surprise, not caused by the novelty of that which we see or hear, but by a very curious echo in the mind. I say echo. I would do better to use the word memory-echo. It seems to us, although we know positively we have never seen or heard of this new thing in our mortal lives, that we heard or saw it in some infinitely remote period. An old Latin writer considered this phenomenon to be a proof of the theory of Preexistence. A Buddhist would tell you that the soul, through all its wanderings of a million years, retains faint memories of all it has seen or heard in each transmigration and that each of us now living in the flesh possesses dim and ghostly recollections of things heard and seen æons before our birth. That the phenomenon exists there can be no doubt. I am not a believer in Buddhism nor in the soul; but I attribute the existence of these vague memories to hereditary brain impressions."

"How do you mean, Doctor?" asked one of the boarders.

"Why, sir, I mean that a memory may be inherited just like a mole, a birthmark, a physical or a moral characteristic. Our brains, as a clever writer has expressed it, are like the rocks of the Sinaitic valley, all covered over with inscriptions written there by the long caravans of Thought. Each impression received upon the brain through the medium of the senses leaves there a hieroglyphic inscription, which, although invisible under the microscope, is nevertheless material and real. Why should not these hieroglyphs of the parent brain reappear in the brain of the child?--fainter and less decipherable to the eyes of the memory, yet not so faint as to be wholly lost."

There was a long silence. The moon rose higher; the bananas did not wave their leaves; the air still glowed with the heat of the dead day; and the stars in the blue above sparkled with that luminosity only known to Southern nights. Everything seemed to dream except the lights of heaven, and we dreamed also of the Infinite.

"Doctor," said a bearded stranger, who had remained silent all the evening, "I want to ask you a question. I have lived in the West Indies, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico; and I am something of a traveler. I have a good memory, too. I seldom forget the sight of a city I have visited. I remember every street and nook I have ever seen. How is it, then, that I dream continually of places which I am positive I have never seen, and hear in my sleep a tongue spoken that I have never heard while awake in any part of the world?"

The Doctor smiled. "Can you describe," he asked, "the places you see in your dreams?"

"I can, because I have dreamed of them more than a hundred times. Sometimes I do not dream of them for a year at a time; and then again I will dream of them every night for a week. And I always hear that strange tongue spoken.

"I sail to these places from a vast port, surrounded by huge wharves of cut stone--white and even-worn by the friction of a mighty traffic. It is all sun there and light and air. There are tropical fruits heaped up, and wines and oils and spices; and many people in brightly colored dresses, blue and yellow. I have a queer idea that it might be some port in the Mediterranean.

"Then I arrive after a long voyage in a strange country. I do not remember the disembarking. I only remember a great city. It is not built like any American or European city. Its houses are high; its streets narrow and fantastic. I have seen in Spain a few buildings which reminded me of those I dream about; but they were old Moorish buildings.

"There is an immense edifice in one part of the city, with two graceful domes, rising like white breasts against a sky most intensely blue. There are tall and very slender white towers near the domes. There are enormous stairways of white stone leading down into an expanse of still water, reflecting the shadows of the palace, or whatever it may be. I see birds there with immense beaks and flaming plumage, walking about near the water. I have seen such birds stuffed, but never alive, except in dreams. But I do not remember where the stuffed birds came from.

"I feel that the city is as large as one of our great Western cities here. I do not see it, but I feel it. There is a mighty current of human life flowing through its streets. The people are swarthy and graceful. They look like statues of bronze. Their features are delicate and their hair black and straight. Some of the women are naked to the waist, and exceedingly beautiful. They wear immense earrings and curious ornaments of bright metal. The men wear turbans and brightly colored dresses. Some are very lightly clad. There are so many dressed in white! All speak the same strange language I have told you of, and there are camels and apes and elephants and cattle that are not like our cattle; they have a hump between the head and shoulders."

"Is that all?" asked the Doctor.

"All I can remember."

"Were you ever in India?"

"No, sir."

"Have you never visited India even through the medium of art--books, engravings, photographs?"

"I do not believe I have ever read a single illustrated book upon India. I have seen articles brought from India, and some pictures--drawings on rice paper; but this of very late years. I have never seen anything in pictures like the place I have described to you."

"How long have you been dreaming of these places?"

"Well, since I was a boy."

"Was your father ever in India, or your mother?"

"My father was, sir; not my mother. But he died there when I was a child. I was born in Europe."

"Hereditary impressions!" cried the Doctor. "That explains all your stories of metempsychosis. The memories of the father descending to the children, perhaps even to the third and fourth generation. You dream of Indian cities you have never seen and probably never will see. Why? Because the delicate and invisible impressions made upon the brain of an English traveler in India, through the mediums of sight and sound, are inherited by his children born in a colder climate who have never seen the Orient, and will nevertheless be forever haunted by visions of the Far East."

THE GHOSTLY KISS[10]

The theatre was full. I cannot remember what they were playing. I did not have time to observe the actors. I only remember how vast the building seemed. Looking back, I saw an ocean of faces stretching away almost beyond the eye's power of definition to the far circles where the seats rose tier above tier in lines of illumination. The ceiling was blue, and in the midst a great mellow lamp hung suspended like a moon, at a height so lofty that I could not see the suspending chain. All the seats were black. I fancied that the theatre was hung with hangings of black velvet, bordered with a silver fringe that glimmered like tears. The audience were all in white.

All in white!--I asked myself whether I was not in some theatre of some tropical city--why all in white? I could not guess. I fancied at moments that I could perceive a moonlit landscape through far distant oriel windows, and the crests of palms casting moving shadows like gigantic spiders. The air was sweet with a strange and a new perfume; it was a drowsy air--a poppied air, in which the waving of innumerable white fans made no rustle, no sound.

There was a strange stillness and a strange silence. All eyes were turned toward the stage, except my own. I gazed in every direction but that of the stage! I cannot imagine why it was that I rarely looked toward the stage. No one noticed me; no one appeared to perceive that I was the only person in all that vast assembly clad in black--a tiny dark speck in a sea of white light.

Gradually the voices of the actors seemed to me to become fainter and fainter--thin sounds like whispers from another world--a world of ghosts!--and the music seemed not music, but only an echo in the mind of the hearer, like a memory of songs heard and forgotten in forgotten years.

There were faces that I thought strangely familiar--faces I fancied I had seen somewhere else in some other time. But none recognized me.

A woman sat before me--a fair woman with hair as brightly golden as the locks of Aphrodite. I asked my heart why it beat so strangely when I turned my eyes upon her. I felt as if it sought to leap from my breast and fling itself all palpitating under her feet. I watched the delicate movements of her neck, where a few loose bright curls were straying, like strands of gold clinging to a column of ivory;--the soft curve of the cheek flushed by a faint ruddiness like the velvet surface of a half-ripe peach;--the grace of the curving lips--lips sweet as those of the Cnidian Venus, which even after two thousand years still seem humid, as with the kisses of the last lover. But the eyes I could not see.

And a strange desire rose within me--an intense wish to kiss those lips. My heart said, Yes;--my reason whispered, No. I thought of the ten thousand thousand eyes that might suddenly be turned upon me. I looked back; and it seemed to me as if the whole theatre had grown vaster! The circles of seats had receded;--the great centre lamp seemed to have mounted higher;--the audience seemed vast as that we dream of in visions of the Last Judgment. And my heart beat so violently that I heard its passionate pulsation, louder than the voices of the actors, and I feared lest it should betray me to all the host of white-clad men and women above me. But none seemed to hear or to see me. I trembled as I thought of the consequences of obeying the mad impulse that became every moment more overpowering and uncontrollable.

And my heart answered, "One kiss of those lips were worth the pain of ten thousand deaths."

I do not remember that I arose. I only remember finding myself beside her, close to her, breathing her perfumed breath, and gazing into eyes deep as the amethystine heaven of a tropical night. I pressed my lips passionately to hers; I felt a thrill of inexpressible delight and triumph; I felt the warm soft lips curl back to meet mine, and give me back my kiss!

And a great fear suddenly came upon me. And all the multitude of white-clad men and women arose in silence; and ten thousand thousand eyes looked upon me.

I heard a voice, faint, sweet--such a voice as we hear when dead loves visit us in dreams:

"Thou hast kissed me: the compact is sealed forever."

And raising my eyes once more I saw that all the seats were graves and all the white dresses shrouds. Above me a light still shone in the blue roof, but only the light of a white moon in the eternal azure of heaven. White tombs stretched away in weird file to the verge of the horizon; where it had seemed to me that I beheld a play, I saw only a lofty mausoleum; and I knew that the perfume of the night was but the breath of flowers dying upon the tombs!

THE BLACK CUPID[11]

There was a small picture hanging in the room; and I took the light to examine it. I do not know why I could not sleep. Perhaps it was the excitement of travel.

The gilded frame, massive and richly moulded, inclosed one of the strangest paintings I had ever seen, a woman's head lying on a velvet pillow, one arm raised and one bare shoulder with part of a beautiful bosom relieved against a dark background. As I said, the painting was small. The young woman was evidently reclining upon her right side; but only her head, elevated upon the velvet pillow, her white throat, one beautiful arm and part of the bosom was visible.

With consummate art the painter had contrived that the spectator should feel as though leaning over the edge of the couch--not visible in the picture--so as to bring his face close to the beautiful face on the pillow. It was one of the most charming heads a human being ever dreamed of; such a delicate bloom on the cheeks;--such a soft, humid light in the half-closed eyes;--such sun-bright hair;--such carnation lips;--such an oval outline! And all this relieved against a deep black background. In the lobe of the left ear I noticed a curious earring--a tiny Cupid wrought in black jet, suspending himself by his bow, which he held by each end, as if trying to pull it away from the tiny gold chain which fettered it to the beautiful ear, delicate and faintly rosy as a seashell. What a strange earring it was! I wondered if the black Cupid presided over unlawful loves, unblest amours!

But the most curious thing about the picture was the attitude and aspect of the beautiful woman. Her head, partly thrown back, with half-closed eyes and tender smile, seemed to be asking a kiss. The lips pouted expectantly. I almost fancied I could feel her perfumed breath. Under the rounded arm I noticed a silky floss of bright hair in tiny curls. The arm was raised as if to be flung about the neck of the person from whom the kiss was expected. I was astonished by the art of the painter. No photograph could have rendered such effects, however delicately colored; no photograph could have reproduced the gloss of the smooth shoulder, the veins, the smallest details! But the picture had a curious fascination. It produced an effect upon me as if I were looking at living beauty, a rosy and palpitating reality. Under the unsteady light of the lamp I once fancied that I saw the lips move, the eyes glisten! The head seemed to advance itself out of the canvas as though to be kissed. Perhaps it was very foolish; but I could not help kissing it--not once but a hundred times; and then I suddenly became frightened. Stories of bleeding statues and mysterious pictures and haunted tapestry came to my mind; and alone in a strange house and a strange city I felt oddly nervous. I placed the light on the table and went to bed.

But it was impossible to sleep. Whenever I began to doze a little, I saw the beautiful head on the pillow close beside me--the same smile, the same lips, the golden hair, the silky floss under the caressing arm. I rose, dressed myself, lit a pipe, blew out the light, and smoked in the dark, until the faint blue tints of day stole in through the windows. Afar off I saw the white teeth of the Sierra flush rosily, and heard the rumbling of awakening traffic.

"Las cinco menos quarto, señor," cried the servant as he knocked upon my door--"tiempo para levantarse."

Before leaving I asked the landlord about the picture.

He answered with a smile, "It was painted by a madman, señor."

"But who?" I asked. "Mad or not, he was a master genius."

"I do not even remember his name. He is dead. They allowed him to paint in the madhouse. It kept his mind tranquil. I obtained the painting from his family after his death. They refused to accept money for it, saying they were glad to give it away."

I had forgotten all about the painting when some five years after I happened to be passing through a little street in Mexico City. My attention was suddenly attracted by some articles I saw in the window of a dingy shop, kept by a Spanish Jew. A pair of earrings--two little Cupids wrought in black jet, holding their bows above their heads, the bows being attached by slender gold chains to the hooks of the earrings!

I remembered the picture in a moment! And that night!

"I do not really care to sell them, señor," said the swarthy jeweler, "unless I get my price. You cannot get another pair like them. I know who made them! They were made for an artist who came here expressly with the design. He wished to make a present to a certain woman."

"Una Méjicana?"

"No, Americana."

"Fair, with dark eyes--about twenty, perhaps, at that time--a little rosy?"

"Why, did you know her? They used to call her Josefita. You know he killed her? Jealousy. They found her still smiling, as if she had been struck while asleep. A 'punal.' I got the earrings back at a sale."

"And the artist?"

"Died at P--, mad! Some say he was mad when he killed her. If you really want the earrings, I will let you have them for sixty pesos. They cost a hundred and fifty."

WHEN I WAS A FLOWER[12]

I was once a flower--fair and large. My snowy chalice, filled with a perfume so rich as to intoxicate the rainbow-winged insects that perched upon it, recalled to those who beheld me the beauty of those myrrhine cups used at the banquets of the old Cæsars.

The bees sang to me all through the bright summer; the winds caressed me in the hours of sultriness; the Spirit of the Dew filled my white cup by night. Great plants, with leaves broader than the ears of elephants, overshadowed me as with a canopy of living emerald.

Far off I heard the river singing its mystic and everlasting hymn and the songs of a thousand birds. By night I peeped up through my satiny petals at the infinite procession of the stars; and by day I turned forever to the eye of the sun my heart of yellow gold.

Hummingbirds with jeweled breasts, flying from the Rising of the Sun, nestled near me and drank the perfumed dews left lingering in my chalice, and sang to me of the wonders of unknown lands--of black roses that grew only in the gardens of magicians and spectral lilies whose perfume is death which open their hearts only to tropical moons.

They severed the emerald thread of my life, and placed me in her hair. I did not feel the slow agony of death, like the fettered fireflies that glimmered as stars in the night-darkness of those splendid tresses. I felt the perfume of my life mingling in her blood and entering the secret chambers of her heart; and I mourned that I was but a flower.

That night we passed away together. I know not how she died. I had hoped to share her eternal sleep; but a weird wind entering through the casement rent my dead leaves asunder and scattered them in white ruin upon the pillow. Yet my ghost like a faint perfume still haunted the silent chamber and hovered about the flames of the waxen tapers.

Other flowers, not of my race, are blooming above her place of rest. It is her blood that lives in the rosiness of their petals; her breath that lends perfume to their leaves; her life that vitalizes their veins of diaphanous green. But in the wizard hours of the night, the merciful Spirit of the Dew, who mourns the death of summer day, bears me aloft and permits me to mingle with the crystal tears which fall upon her grave.

METEMPSYCHOSIS[13]

"Those theories which you call wild dreams," cried the Doctor, rising to his feet as he spoke, his features glowing with enthusiasm under the moon, "are but the mystic veils with which the eternal Isis veils her awful face. Your deep German philosophy is shallow--your modern pantheism vaguer than smoke--compared with the mighty knowledge of the East. The theories of the greatest modern thinkers were taught in India before the name of Rome was heard in the world; and our scientific researches of to-day simply confirm most ancient Oriental beliefs, which we, in our ignorance, have spoken of as dreams of madmen."

"Yes, but surely, you cannot otherwise characterize the idea of the transmigration of souls?"

"Ah! souls, souls," replied the stranger, drawing at his cigar until it glowed like a carbuncle in the night--"we have nothing to do with souls, but with facts. The metempsychosis is only the philosophic symbol of a vast natural fact, grotesque only to those who understand it not,--just as the most hideous Indian idol, diamond-eyed and skull-chapleted, represents to the Brahmin a hidden truth incomprehensible to the people. Conscious of the eternity of Matter and Force;--knowing that the substance of whirling universes, like clay in the hands of the potter, has been and is being and will be forever fashioned into myriad shifting forms;--knowing that shapes alone are evanescent, and that each atom of our living bodies has been from the beginning and will always be, even after the mountains have melted like wax in the heat of a world's dissolution--it is impossible to regard the theory of transmigration as a mere fantasy. Each particle of our flesh has lived before our birth through millions of transmigrations more wonderful than any poet has dared to dream of; and the life-force that throbs in the heart of each one of us has throbbed for all time in the eternal metempsychosis of the universe. Each atom of our blood has doubtless circulated, before our very civilization commenced, through the veins of millions of living creatures--soaring, crawling, or dwelling in the depths of the sea; and each molecule that floats in a sunbeam has, perhaps, vibrated to the thrill of human passion. The soil under my foot has lived and loved; and Nature, refashioning the paste in her awful laboratory into new forms of being, shall make this clay to live and hope and suffer again. Dare I even whisper to you of the past transformations of the substance of the rosiest lips you have kissed, or the brightest eyes which have mirrored your look? We have lived innumerable lives in the past; we have lived in the flowers, in the birds, in the emerald abysses of the ocean;--we have slept in the silence of solid rocks, and moved in the swells of the thunder-chanting sea;--we have been women as well as men;--we have changed our sex a thousand times like the angels of the Talmud; and we shall continue the everlasting transmigration long after the present universe has passed away and the fires of the stars have burned themselves out. Can one know these things and laugh at the theories of the East?"

"But the theory of Cycles--"

"It is not less of a solemn truth. Knowing that Force and Matter are eternal, we know also that the kaleidoscope of changing shapes must whirl forever. But as the colored particles within a kaleidoscope are limited, only a certain number of combinations may be produced. Are not the elements of eternal matter limited? If so, their combinations must also be; and as the everlasting force must forever continue to create forms, it can only repeat its work. Then, we must believe that all which has already happened must have happened before throughout all time, and will happen again at vast intervals through all eternity. It is not the first time we have sat together on the night of September 6;--we have done so in other Septembers, yet the same; and in other New Orleanses, the same yet not the same. We must have done it centrillions of times before, and will do it centrillions of times again through the æons of the future. I shall be again as I am, yet different; I shall smoke the same cigar, yet a different one. The same chair with the same scratches on its polished back will be there for you to sit in; and we shall hold the same conversation. The same good-natured lady will bring us a bottle of wine of the same quality; and the same persons will be reunited in this quaint Creole house. Trees like these will fling their shadows on the pavement; and above us shall we again behold as now the golden swarm of worlds sparkling in the abysses of the infinite night. There will be new stars and a new universe, yet we shall know it only as we know it at this moment that centrillions of years ago we must have suffered and hoped and loved as we do in these weary years. Good-bye, friends!"

He flung the stump of his cigar among the vines, where it expired in a shower of rosy sparks; and his footsteps died away forever. NAY, not forever; for though we should see him no more in this life, shall we not see him again throughout the Cycles and the Æons? YEA, alas, forever; for even though we should see him again throughout the Cycles and the Æons, will it not be so that he always departeth under the same circumstances and at the same moment, in sæcula sæculorum?

THE UNDYING ONE[14]

I have lived for three thousand years; I am weary of men and of the world: this earth has become too small for such as I; this sky seems a gray vault of lead about to sink down and crush me.

There is not a silver hair in my head; the dust of thirty centuries has not dimmed my eyes. Yet I am weary of the earth.

I speak a thousand tongues; and the faces of the continents are familiar to me as the characters of a book; the heavens have unrolled themselves before mine eyes as a scroll; and the entrails of the earth have no secrets for me.

I have sought knowledge in the deepest deeps of ocean gulfs;--in the waste places where sands shift their yellow waves, with a dry and bony sound;--in the corruption of charnel houses and the hidden horrors of the catacombs;--amid the virgin snows of Dwalagiri;--in the awful labyrinths of forests untrodden by man;--in the wombs of dead volcanoes;--in lands where the surface of lake or stream is studded with the backs of hippopotami or enameled with the mail of crocodiles;--at the extremities of the world where spectral glaciers float over inky seas;--in those strange parts where no life is, where the mountains are rent asunder by throes of primeval earthquake, and where the eyes behold only a world of parched and jagged ruin, like the Moon--of dried-up seas and river channels worn out by torrents that ceased to roll long ere the birth of man.

All the knowledge of all the centuries, all the craft and skill and cunning of man in all things--are mine, and yet more!

For Life and Death have whispered me their most ancient secrets; and all that men have vainly sought to learn has for me no mystery.

Have I not tasted all the pleasures of this petty world--pleasures that would have consumed to ashes a frame less mighty than my own?

I have built temples with the Egyptians, the princes of India, and the Cæsars; I have aided conquerors to vanquish a world; I have reveled through nights of orgiastic fury with rulers of Thebes and Babylon; I have been drunk with wine and blood!

The kingdoms of the earth and all their riches and glory have been mine.

With that lever which Archimedes desired I have uplifted empires and overthrown dynasties. Nay! like a god, I have held the world in the hollow of my hand.

All that the beauty of youth and the love of woman can give to make joyful the hearts of men, have I possessed; no Assyrian king, no Solomon, no ruler of Samarcand, no Caliph of Bagdad, no Rajah of the most eastern East, has ever loved as I; and in my myriad loves I have beheld the realization of all that human thought had conceived or human heart desired or human hand crystallized into that marble of Pentelicus called imperishable--yet less enduring than these iron limbs of mine.

And ruddy I remain like that rosy granite of Egypt on which kings carved their dreams of eternity.

But I am weary of this world!

I have attained all that I sought; I have desired nothing that I have not obtained--save that I now vainly desire and yet shall never obtain.

There is no comrade for me in all this earth; no mind that can comprehend me; no heart that can love me for what I am.

Should I utter what I know, no living creature could understand; should I write my knowledge no human brain could grasp my thought. Wearing the shape of a man, capable of doing all that man can do--yet more perfectly than man can ever do--I must live as these my frail companions, and descend to the level of their feeble minds, and imitate their puny works, though owning the wisdom of a god! How mad were those Greek dreamers who sang of gods descending to the level of humanity that they might love a woman!

In other centuries I feared to beget a son--a son to whom I might have bequeathed my own immortal youth; jealous that I was of sharing my secret with any terrestrial creature! Now the time has past. No son of mine born in this age, of this degenerate race, could ever become a worthy companion for me. Oceans would change their beds, and new continents arise from the emerald gulfs, and new races appear upon the earth ere he could comprehend the least of my thoughts!

The future holds no pleasure in reserve for me:--I have foreseen the phases of a myriad million years. All that has been will be again:--all that will be has been before. I am solitary as one in a desert; for men have become as puppets in my eyes, and the voice of living woman hath no sweetness for my ears.

Only to the voices of the winds and of the sea do I hearken;--yet do even these weary me, for they murmured me the same music and chanted me the same hymns, among aged woods or ancient rocks, three thousand years ago!

To-night I shall have seen the moon wax and wane thirty-six thousand nine hundred times! And my eyes are weary of gazing upon its white face.

Ah! I might be willing to live on through endless years, could I but transport myself to other glittering worlds, illuminated by double suns and encircled by galaxies of huge moons!--other worlds in which I might find knowledge equal to my own, and minds worthy of my companionship--and--perhaps--women that I might love--not hollow Emptinesses, not El-women like the spectres of Scandinavian fable, and like the frail mothers of this puny terrestrial race, but creatures of immortal beauty worthy to create immortal children!

Alas!--there is a power mightier than my will, deeper than my knowledge--a Force "deaf as fire, blind as the night," which binds me forever to this world of men.

Must I remain like Prometheus chained to his rock in never-ceasing pain, with vitals eternally gnawed by the sharp beak of the vulture of Despair, or dissolve this glorious body of mine forever?

I might live till the sun grows dim and cold; yet am I too weary to live longer.

I shall die utterly--even as the beast dieth, even as the poorest being dieth that bears the shape of man; and leave no written thought behind that human thought can ever grasp. I shall pass away as a flying smoke, as a shadow, as a bubble in the crest of a wave in mid-ocean, as the flame of a taper blown out; and none shall ever know that which I was. This heart that has beaten unceasingly for three thousand years; these feet that have trod the soil of all parts of the earth; these hands that have moulded the destinies of nations; this brain that contains a thousandfold more wisdom than all the children of the earth ever knew, shall soon cease to be. And yet to shatter and destroy the wondrous mechanism of this brain--a brain worthy of the gods men dream of--a temple in which all the archives of terrestrial knowledge are stored!

. . . . . . . . .

The moon is up! O death-white dead world!--couldst thou too feel, how gladly wouldst thou cease thy corpselike circlings in the Night of Immensity and follow me to that darker immensity where even dreams are dead!

THE VISION OF THE DEAD CREOLE[15]

The waters of the Gulf were tepid in the warmth of the tropical night. A huge moon looked down upon me as I swam toward the palm-fringed beach; and looking back I saw the rigging of the vessel sharply cut against its bright face. There was no sound! The sea-ripples kissed the brown sands silently, as if afraid; faint breezes laden with odors of saffron and cinnamon and drowsy flowers came over the water;--the stars seemed vaster than in other nights;--the fires of the Southern Cross burned steadily without one diamond-twinkle;--I paused a moment in terror;--for it seemed I could hear the night breathe--in long, weird sighs. The fancy passed as quickly as it came. The ship's bells struck the first hour of the morning. I stood again on the shore where I had played as a child, and saw through the palms the pale houses of the quaint city beyond, whence I had fled with blood upon my hands twenty-seven long years before.

Was it a witch-night, that the city slumbered so deep a sleep and the sereno slept at his post as I passed? I know not, but it was well for him that he slept! I passed noiselessly as the Shadow of Death through the ancient gates, and through the shadows flung down by the projecting balconies, and along the side of the plaza unilluminated by the gaze of the tropical moon, and where the towers of the cathedral made goblin shapes of darkness on the pavement; and along narrow ways where the star-sprinkled blue of heaven above seemed but a ribbon of azure, jagged and gashed along its edges by sharp projections of balconies; and beyond again into the white moonshine, where orange trees filled the warm air with a perfume as that of a nuptial chamber; and beyond, yet farther, where ancient cypresses with roots and branches gnarled and twisted as by the tortures of a thousand years of agony, bowed weirdly over the Place of Tombs.

Gigantic spiders spun their webs under the moon between the walls of the tombs;--vipers glided over my feet;--the vampire hovered above under the stars; and fireflies like corpse-lights circled about the resting-places of the dead. Great vines embraced the marbles green with fungus-growths;--the ivy buried its lizard feet in the stones;--lianas had woven a veil, thick as that of Isis, across the epitaphs carven above the graves. But I found HER tomb! I would have reached it, as I had sworn, even in the teeth of Death and Hell!

I tore asunder the venomous plants which clung to the marble like reptiles;--but the blood poured from my hands upon her name;--and I could not find one unreddened spot to kiss. And I heard the blood from my fingers dripping with a thick, dead sound, as of molten lead, upon the leaves of the uptorn plants at my feet.

And the dead years rose from their graves of mist and stood around me! I saw the moss-green terrace where I received her first kiss that filled my veins with madness;--the marble urns with their carved bas-reliefs of naked dancing boys;--the dead fountain choked with water-lilies;--the monstrous flowers that opened their hearts to the moon. And SHE!--the sinuous outlines of that body of Corinthian bronze unconcealed by the feathery lightness of the white robe she wore;--the Creole eyes;--the pouting and passionate mouth;--and that cruel, sphinx-smile, that smile of Egypt, eternally pitiless, eternally mystical--the smile she wore when I flung myself like a worm before her to kiss her feet, and vainly shrieked to her to trample upon me, to spit upon me! And after my fierce moment of vengeance, the smile of Egypt still remained upon her dark face, as though moulded in everlasting bronze.

There was no rustle among the lianas, no stir among the dead leaves; yet SHE stood again before me! My heart seemed to cease its beatings;--a chill as of those nights in which I had sailed Antarctic seas passed over me! Robed in white as in the buried years, with lights like fireflies in her hair, and the same dark, elfish smile! And suddenly the chill passed away with a fierce cataclysm of the blood, as though each of its cells were heated by volcanic fire;--for the strange words of the Hebrew canticle came to me like a far echo--

LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH!

I burst the fetters with which horror had chained my voice;--I spake to her; I wept--I wept tears of blood!

And the old voice came to me, argentine and low and mockingly sweet as the voices of birds that call to each other through the fervid West Indian night--

"I knew thou wouldst come back to me--howsoever long thou mightst wander under other skies and over other seas.

"Didst thou dream that I was dead? Nay, I die not so quickly! I have lived through all these years. I shall live on; and thou must return hither again to visit me like a thief in the night.

"Knowest thou how I have lived? I have lived in the bitter tears thou hast wept through all these long years;--the agony of the remorse that seized thee in silent nights and lonesome wastes;--in the breath of thy youth and life exhaled in passionate agony when no human eyes beheld thee;--in the images that haunt thy dreams and make it a horror for thee to find thyself alone! Yet wouldst thou kiss me--"

I looked upon her again in the white light;--I saw the same weirdly beautiful face, the same smile of the sphinx;--I saw the vacant tomb yawning to its entrails;--I saw its shadow--my shadow--lying sharply upon the graves;--and I saw that the tall white figure before me _cast no shadow before the moon!_

And suddenly under the stars, sonorous and vibrant as far cathedral bells, the voices of the awakening watchmen chanted--Ave Maria Purísima!--las tres de la mañana, y tiempo sereno!

THE NAME ON THE STONE[16]

"As surely as the wild bird seeks the summer, you will come back," she whispered. "Is there a drop of blood in your veins that does not grow ruddier and warmer at the thought of me? Does not your heart beat quicker at this moment because I am here? It belongs to me;--it obeys me in spite of your feeble will;--it will remain my slave when you are gone. You have bewitched yourself at my lips; I hold you as a bird is held by an invisible thread; and my thread, invisible and intangible, is stronger than your will. Fly: but you can no longer fly beyond the circle in which my wish confines you. Go: but I shall come to you in dreams of the night; and you will be awakened by the beating of your own heart to find yourself alone with darkness and memory. Sleep in whose arms you will, I shall come like a ghost between you; kiss a thousand lips, but it will be I that shall receive them. Though you circle the earth in your wanderings, you will never be able to leave my memory behind you; and your pulse will quicken at recollections of me whether you find yourself under Indian suns or Northern lights. You lie when you say you do not love me!--your heart would fling itself under my feet could it escape from its living prison! You will come back."

And having vainly sought rest through many vainly spent years, I returned to her. It was a night of wild winds and fleeting shadows and strange clouds that fled like phantoms before the storm and across the face of the moon. "You are a cursed witch," I shrieked, "but I have come back!"

And she, placing a finger--white as the waxen tapers that are burned at the feet of the dead--upon my lips, only smiled and whispered, "Come with me."

And I followed her.

The thunder muttered in the east; the horizon pulsated with lightnings; the night-birds screamed as we reached the iron gates of the burial-ground, which swung open with a groan at her touch.

Noiselessly she passed through the ranges of the graves; and I saw the mounds flame when her feet touched them--flame with a cold white dead flame like the fire of the glow-worm.

Was it an illusion of broken moonlight and flying clouds, or did the dead rise and follow us like a bridal train?

And was it only the vibration of the thunder, or did the earth quake when I stood upon _that_ grave?

"Look not behind you even for an instant," she muttered, "or you are lost."

But there came to me a strange desire to read the name graven upon the moss-darkened stone; and even as it came the storm unveiled the face of the moon. And the dark shadow at my side whispered, "Read it not!"

And the moon veiled herself again. "I cannot go! I cannot go!" I whispered passionately, "until I have read the name upon this stone."

Then a flash of lightning in the east revealed to me the name; and an agony of memory came upon me; and I shrieked it to the flying clouds and the wan lights of heaven!

Again the earth quaked under my feet; and a white Shape rose from the bosom of the grave like an exhalation and stood before me: I felt the caress of lips shadowy as those of the fair phantom women who haunt the dreams of youth; and the echo of a dead voice, faint as the whisper of a summer wind, murmured: "Love, love is stronger than Death!--I come back from the eternal night to save thee!"

APHRODITE AND THE KING'S PRISONER[17]

Columns of Corinthian marble stretching away in mighty perspective and rearing their acanthus capitals a hundred feet above the polished marble from which they rose;--antique mosaics from the years of Hadrian;--Pompeiian frescoes limning all the sacrifices made to Aphrodite;--naked bronzes uplifting marvelous candelabra;--fantastically beautiful oddities in terra cotta;--miracles of art in Pentelic marble;--tripods supporting vessels of burning spices which filled the palace with perfumes as intoxicating as the Song of Solomon;--and in the midst of all a range of melodious fountains amid whose waters white nymphs showed their smooth thighs of stone and curved their marble figures into all the postures that harmonize with beauty. Vast gardens of myrtle and groves of laurel, mystic and shadowy as those of Daphne, surrounded the palace with a world of deep green, broken only at intervals by the whiteness of Parian dryads;--flowers formed a living carpet upon the breadth of the terraces, and a river washed the eastern walls and marble stairways of the edifice. It was a world of wonders and of marvels, of riches and rarities, though created by the vengeance of a king. There was but one human life amid all that enchantment of Greek marble, of petrified loveliness and beauty made motionless in bronze. No servants were ever seen;--no voice was ever heard;--there was no exit from that strange paradise. It was said that the king's prisoner was served by invisible hands;--that tables covered with luxurious viands rose up through the marble pavements at regular hours;--and the fumes of the richest wines of the Levant, sweetened with honey, perfumed the chamber chosen for his repasts. All that art could inspire, all that gold might obtain, all that the wealth of a world could create were for him--save only the sound of a human voice and the sight of a human face. To madden in the presence of unattainable loveliness, to consume his heart in wild longings to realize the ravishing myth of Pygmalion, to die of a dream of beauty--such was the sentence of the king!

Lovelier than all other lovelinesses created in stone or gem or eternal bronze by the hands of men whose lives were burnt out in longings for a living idol worthy of their dreams of perfect beauty--a figure of Aphrodite displayed the infinite harmony of her naked loveliness upon a pedestal of black marble, so broad and so highly polished that it reflected the divine poem of her body like a mirror of ebony--the Foam-born rising from the silent deeps of a black Ægean. The delicate mellowness of the antique marble admirably mocked the tint of human flesh;--a tropical glow, a golden warmth seemed to fill the motionless miracle--this dream of love frozen into marble by a genius greater than Praxiteles; no modern restorer had given to the attitude of this bright divinity the Christian anachronism of shame. With arms extended as if to welcome a lover, all the exquisite curves of her bosom faced the eyes of the beholder; and with one foot slightly advanced she seemed in the act of stepping forward to bestow a kiss. And a brazen tablet let into the black marble of the pedestal bore, in five learned tongues, the strange inscription:

Created by the hand of one maddened by love, I madden all
who gaze upon me. Mortal, condemned to live in solitude with
me, prepare thyself to die of love at my feet. The old gods,
worshiped by youth and beauty, are dead; and no immortal
power can place a living heart in this stony bosom or lend
to these matchless limbs the warm flexibility and rosiness
of life.

Around the chamber of the statue ran a marble wainscoting chiseled with Bacchanal bas-reliefs--a revel of rude dryads and fauns linking themselves in amorous interlacings;--upon an altar of porphyry flickered the low flame of the holy fire fed with leaves of the myrtle sacred to love;--doves for the sacrifice were cooing and wooing in the marble court without;--a sound of crystal water came from a fountain near the threshold, where beautiful feminine monsters, whose lithe flanks blended into serpent coils, upheld in their arms of bronze the fantastic cup from which the living waters leapt; a balmy, sensuous air, bearing on its wings the ghosts of perfumes known to the voluptuaries of Corinth, filled the softly lighted sanctuary;--and on either side of the threshold stood two statues, respectively in white and black marble--Love, the blond brother of Death; Death, the dark brother of Love, with torch forever extinguished.

And the King knew that the Prisoner kept alive the sacred fire, and poured out the blood of the doves at the feet of the goddess, who smiled with the eternal smile of immortal youth and changeless loveliness and the consciousness of the mighty witchery of her enchanting body. For secret watchers came to the palace and said:

"When he first beheld the awful holiness of her beauty, he fell prostrate as one bereft of life, and long so remained."

And the King musingly made answer:

"Aphrodite is no longer to be appeased with the blood of doves, but only with the blood of men--men of mighty hearts and volcanic passion. He is youthful and strong and an artist!--and he must soon die. Let the weapons of death be mercifully placed at the feet of Aphrodite, that her victim may be able to offer himself up in sacrifice."

Now the secret messengers were eunuchs. And they came again to the palace, and whispered in the ears of the silver-bearded King:

"He has again poured out the blood of the doves, and he sings the sacred Hymn of Homer, and kisses her marble body until his lips bleed;--and the goddess still smiles the smile of perfect loveliness that is pitiless."

And the King answered:

"It is even as I desire."

A second time the messengers came to the palace, and whispered in the ears of the iron-eyed King: