LAFCADIO HEARN (1850-1904) No other author of America, not even Mark Twain or Joaquin Miller, had a more picturesque career or possessed a more puzzling personality than Lafcadio Hearn. Son of an Irish soldier and a Grecian mother, born on Leucadia, the Ionian island of Sappho, he passed a part of his boyhood with an aunt in Ireland and a part of it in France and in England where he was educated for the priesthood. At sixteen, however, he ran away, spent three obscure years in the London underworld, made his way to New York at nineteen, and later, drifting westward, worked for a time on the Cincinnati Enquirer. In 1877 he was in New Orleans, a reporter, pouring his eager, De Quincey-like dreamings into the city papers, and then, after a visit to Grande Isle in the Gulf of Mexico, publishing in the Times-Democrat his Torn Letters, which afterwards in 1888 were to appear in Harper's Monthly as Chita. From New Orleans, restless and excited, he drifted on to the Windward Islands where he wrote his Two Years in the French West Indies, then on to New York and then, commissioned by the Harpers, on to Japan where he spent the rest of his life, marrying a Japanese wife. adopting the Bhuddist religion, and taking out naturalization papers as a citizen of the empire. No other American has so filled his pages with color and sensation and florid impressionism as Hearn. His books, like Chita for instance, are a series of lurid pictures and intense sensuous impressions. It leaps and bounds, it chokes with tropic heat, it blazes with the sunsets of the Mexican gulf, it stagnates with torrid siestas, it is raucous with the voices of tropic insects and birds. It is incoherent. rhapsodic. half picture, half suggestion - materials rather than final structure. Later he did for Japan what he had done for the American tropics. It was something unique in English literature, for no other occidental has ever entered so completely into the soul of oriental life or has succeeded in so clearly interpreting it to the western world. His most enduring work undoubtedly is to be found in these Japanese studies, but his most thrilling and beautiful and intense books are those of his first inspiration, those colorful and moving pictures of the western tropics. CHITA THE LEGEND OF L'ÎLE DERNIÈRE 1 I swans. But the miniature steamboat on which you engage passage to the Gulf never lingers long in the Mississippi: she crosses the river, slips into some canal5 mouth, labors along the artificial channel awhile, and then leaves it with a scream of joy, to puff her free way down many a league of heavily shadowed bayou. Perhaps thereafter she may bear you through the immense silence of drenched rice-fields, where the yellow-green level is broken at long intervals by the black silhouette of some irrigating machine; but whichever of the five different routes be pursued, you will find yourself more than once floating through somber mazes of swamp-forest,- past assemblages of cypresses all hoary with the parasitic tillandsia, and grotesque as gatherings of fetich-gods. Ever from river or from lakelet the steamer glides again into canal or bayou, from bayou or canal once more into lake or bay; and sometimes the Traveling south from New Orleans to the Islands, you pass through a strange land into a strange sea, by various winding waterways. You can journey to the Gulf by lugger if you please; but the 10 trip may be made much more rapidly and agreeably on some of those light, narrow steamers, built especially for bayou-travel, which usually receive passengers at a point not far from the foot of old Saint- 15 Louis Street, hard by the sugar-landing, where there is ever a pushing and flocking of steam-craft- all striving for place to rest their white breasts against the levée, side by side,-like great weary 20 1 Reprinted from Chita: A Memory of Last Island, by arrangement with Harper & Brothers, the owner of the copyright. swamp-forest visibly thins away from Shadows lengthen; and at last the woods dwindle away behind you into thin bluish lines; - land and water alike take 30 more luminous color; - bayous open into broad passes; - lakes link themselves with sea-bays; - and the ocean-wind bursts upon you,-keen, cool, and full of light. For the first time the vessel begins 35 to swing, rocking to the great living pulse of the tides. And gazing from the deck around you, with no forest walls to break the view, it will seem to you that the low land must have once been rent 40 asunder by the sea, and strewn about the Gulf in fantastic tatters. Louisiana the Catholic traditions of the Indes. There are girls in those unfamiliar villages worthy to inspire any statuary,- beautiful with the beauty of ruddy 5 bronze,- gracile as the palmettoes that sway above them. . . . Farther seaward you may also pass a Chinese settlement: some queer camp of wooden dwellings clustering around a vast platform that stands above the water upon a thousand piles; - over the miniature wharf you can scarcely fail to observe a white signboard painted with crimson ideographs. The great platform is used for drying fish in the sun; and the fantastic characters of the sign, literally translated, mean: Heap - Shrimp-Plenty.' And finally all the land melts down into desolations of sea-marsh, whose stillness is seldom broken, except by the melancholy cry of long-legged birds, and in wild seasons by that sound which shakes all shores when the weird Musician of the Sea touches the bass keys of his mighty organ. Sometimes above a waste of wind-blown prairie-cane you see an oasis emerging,a ridge or hillock heavily umbraged with 45 the rounded foliage of evergreen oaks: a chénière. And from the shining flood also kindred green knolls arise,- pretty islets, each with its beach girdle of dazzling sand and shells, yellow-white,- and so all radiant with semi-tropical foliage, myrtle and palmetto, orange and magnolia. Under their emerald shadows curious little villages of palmetto huts are drowsing, where dwell a swarthy population of Ori- 55 entals, Malay fishermen, who speak the Spanish-Creole of the Philippines as well as their own Tagal, and perpetuate in II Beyond the sea-marshes a curious archipelago lies. If you travel by steamer to the sea-islands to-day, you are tolerably certain to enter the Gulf by the Grande Pass-skirting Grande Terre, the most familiar island of all, not so much because of its proximity as because of its great crumbling fort and its graceful pharos; the stationary White-Light of Barataria. Otherwise the place is bleakly uninteresting: a wilderness of wind-swept grasses and sinewy weeds waving away from a thin beach ever speckled with drift and decaying things, worm-riddled timbers, dead porpoises. Eastward the russet level is broken by the columnar silhouette of the light-house, and again, beyond it, by some puny scrub timber, above which rise the angular ruddy mass of the old brick fort, whose ditches swarm with crabs, and whose sluiceways are half choked by obsolete cannon-shot, now thickly covered with incrustations of oyster shells. Around all the gray circling of a sharkhaunted sea. Sometimes of autumn evenings there, when the hollow of heaven flames like the interior of a chalice, and waves and clouds are flying in one wild rout of broken gold, you may see the tawny grasses all covered with something like husks,-wheatcolored husks, large, flat, and disposed evenly upon the lee-side of each swaying stalk, so as to present only their edges to the wind. But, if you approach, those pale husks all break open to display strange splendors of scarlet and sealbrown, with arabesque mottlings in white and black: they change into wondrous living blossoms, which detach themselves before your eyes and rise in air, and flutter away by thousands to settle down farther 10 off, and turn into wheat-colored husks once more a whirling flower-drift of sleepy butterflies! story construction of timber, containing many apartments, together with a large dining-room and dancing-hall. In the rear of the hotel was a bayou, where pas5 sengers landed - Village Bayou' it is still called by seamen;- but the deep channel which now cuts the island in two a little eastwardly did not exist while the village remained. The sea tore it out in one night - the same night when trees, fields, dwellings, all vanished into the Gulf, leaving no vestige of former human habitation except a few of those strong brick props and foundations upon which the 15 frame houses and cisterns had been raised. One living creature was found there after the cataclysm-a cow! But how that solitary cow survived the fury of a stormflood that actually rent the island in twain has ever remained a mystery. Southwest, across the pass, gleams beautiful Grande Isle: primitively a wilderness of palmetto (lantanier); then drained, diked, and cultivated by Spanish sugar-planters; and now familiar chiefly as a bathing-resort. Since the war the 20 ocean reclaimed its own; - the canefields have degenerated into sandy plains, over which tramways wind to the smooth beach; the plantation-residences have been converted into rustic hotels, and the 25 negro-quarters remodeled into villages of cozy cottages for the reception of guests. But with its imposing groves of oak, its golden wealth of orange-trees, its odorous lanes of oleander, its broad grazing- 30 meadows yellow-starred with wild camomile, Grande Isle remains the prettiest island of the Gulf; and its loveliness is exceptional. For the bleakness of Grande Terre is reiterated by most of the other 35 islands, Caillou, Cassetête, Calumet, Wine Island, the twin Timbaliers, Gull Island, and the many islets haunted by the gray pelican,- all of which are little more than sand-bars covered with wiry grasses, 40 prairie-canę, and scrub-timber. Last Island (L'Île Dernière),- well worthy a long visit in other years, in spite of its remoteness, is now a ghastly desolation twenty-five miles long. Lying nearly 45 forty miles west of Grande Isle, it was nevertheless far more populated a generation ago it was not only the most celebrated island of the group, but also the most fashionable watering-place of the 50 aristocratic South;-to-day it is visited by fishermen only, at long intervals. Its admirable beach in many respects resembled that of Grande Isle to-day; the accommodations also were much. similar, al- 55 though finer: a charming village of cottages facing the Gulf near the western end. The hotel itself was a massive two III On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees - when there are any trees - all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair,-bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed: - for the sea is devouring the land. Many and many a mile of ground has yielded to the tireless charging of Ocean's cavalry: far out you can see, through a good glass. the porpoises at play where of old the sugar-cane shook out its million bannerets; and shark-fins now seam deep water above a site where pigeons used to coo. Men build dykes: but the besieging tides bring up their battering-rams whole forests of drifthuge trunks of water-oak and weighty cypress. Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles to destroy: - and amid their eternal strife the islands and the promontories change shape, more slowly, but not less fantastically, than the clouds of heaven. And worthy of study are those wan battle-grounds where the woods made their last brave stand against the irresistible invasion,- usually at some long point high tide had pressed de Grande Isle beach. The tropically warm; we had s for a breath of living air 5 and with it the ponderous sudden breeze blew,-lightnings in the darkening horizon, wind and water began to strive together, and soon all the low coast boomed. Then my companion 10 began his story; perhaps the coming of the storm inspired him to speak! And as I listened to him, listening also to the clamoring of the coast, there flashed back to me recollection of a singular Breton fancy: that the Voice of the Sea is never one voice, but a tumult of many voicesvoices of drowned men,- the muttering of multitudinous dead,- the moaning of innumerable ghosts, all rising, to rage against the living, at the great Witch-call of storms. of sea-marsh, widely fringed with billowing sand. Just where the waves curl beyond such a point you may discern a multitude of blackened, snaggy shapes protruding above the water.- some high enough to resemble ruined chimneys, others bearing a startling likeness to enormous skeleton-feet and skeleton-hands, with crustaceous white growths clinging to them here and there like remnants of integument. These are bodies and limbs of drowned oaks,- so long drowned that the shell-scurf is inch-thick upon parts of them. Farther in upon the beach immense trunks lie overthrown. Some look 15 like vast broken columns; some suggest colossal torsos imbedded, and seem to reach out mutilated stumps in despair from their deepening graves; - and beside these are others which have kept their 20 feet with astounding obstinacy, although the barbarian tides have been charging them for twenty years, and gradually torn away the soil above and beneath their roots. The sand around,- soft beneath 25 and thinly crusted upon the surface,- is everywhere pierced with holes made by a beautifully mottled and semi-diaphanous crab, with hairy legs, big staring eyes, and milk-white claws; while in the green 30 sedges beyond there is a perpetual rustling, as of some strong wind beating among reeds: a marvelous creeping of 'fiddlers,' which the inexperienced visitor might at first mistake for so many peculiar beetles, as they run about sideways, each with his huge single claw folded upon his body like a wing-case. Year by year that rustling strip of green land grows narrower; the sand spreads and sinks, shud- 4 dering and wrinkling like a living brown skin; and the last standing corpses of the oaks, ever clinging with naked, dead feet to the sliding beach, lean more and more out of the perpendicular. As the sands subside, the stumps appear to creep: their intertwisted masses of snakeish roots seem to crawl, to writhe,- like the reaching arms of cephalopods. 35 IV The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will best understand me who have seen the splendor of a West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of color, in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles, spirituality, as of external tropical spring. It must have been to even such a sky that Xenophanes lifted up his eyes of old when he vowed the Infinite Blue was God:- it was indeed under such a sky that De Soto named the vastest and grandest of Southern havens Espiritu Santo,- the Bay of the Holy Ghost. There is something unutterable in this bright Gulf-air that compels awe,-something vital, something holy, something pantheistic and reverentially the mind asks itself if what the eye beholds is not the IIveúpa indeed, the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost, the great Blue Soul of the Unknown. All, all is blue in the calm,save the low land under your feet, which you almost forget, since it seems only as a tiny green flake afloat in the liquid eternity of day. Then slowly, caressingly, irresistibly, the witchery of the Infinite grows upon you: out of Time and Space you begin to dream with open eyes.- to drift into delicious oblivion of facts,- to forget the past, the present, the substantial, to comprehend nothing but the ex 45 Grande Terre is going: the sea mines 50 her fort, and will before many years carry the ramparts by storm. Grande Isle is going, slowly but surely: the Gulf has eaten three miles into her meadowed land. Last Island has gone! How it went I first 55 heard from the lips of a veteran pilot. while we sat one evening together on the trunk of a drifted cypress which some nce of that infinite Blue Ghost as mething into which you would wish to melt utterly away forever. And this day-magic of azure endures sometimes for months together. Cloudlessly the dawn reddens up through a violet east: there is no speck upon the blossoming of its Mystical Rose,- unless it be the silhouette of some passing gull, whirling his sickle wings against the crimsoning. Ever, as the sun floats higher, the food shifts its color. Sometimes smooth and gray, yet flickering with the morning gold, it is the vision of John,the apocalyptic Sea of Glass mixed with 15 fire; again, with the growing breeze, it takes that incredible purple tint familiar mostly to painters of West Indian scenery; once more, under the blaze of noon, it changes to a waste of broken em- 20 erald. With the evening, the horizon assumes tints of inexpressible sweetness,pearl-lights, opaline colors of milk and fire; and in the west are topaz-glowings and wondrous flashings as of nacre. 25 Then, if the sea sleeps, it dreams of all these, faintly, weirdly,- shadowing them even to the verge of heaven. Beautiful, too, are those white phantasmagoria which, at the approach of equi- 30 noctial days, mark the coming of the winds. Over the rim of the sea a bright cloud gently pushes up its head. It rises; and others rise with it, to right and left - slowly at first; then more swiftly. All 35 are brilliantly white and flocculent, like loose new cotton. Gradually they mount in enormous line high above the Gulf, rolling and wreathing into an arch that expands and advances,- bending from 40 horizon to horizon. A clear, cold breath accompanies its coming. Reaching the zenith, it seems there to hang poised awhile, a ghostly bridge arching the empyrean,-upreaching its measureless span 45 from either underside of the world. Then the colossal phantom begins to turn, as on a pivot of air,- always preserving its curvilinear symmetry, but moving its unseen ends beyond and below the sky-circle. 50 And at last it floats away unbroken beyond the blue sweep of the world, with a wind following after. Day after day, almost at the same hour, the white arc rises, wheels, and passes. Never a glimpse of rock on these low shores; only long sloping beaches and bars of smooth tawny sand. Sand and sea teem with vitality; - over all the dunes there is a constant susurration, a blattering and swarming of crustacea; through all the sea there is a ceaseless 5 play of silver lightning,-flashing of myriad fish. Sometimes the shallows are thickened with minute, transparent, crablike organisms,- all colorless as gelatine. There are days also when countless medusae drift in- beautiful veined creatures that throb like hearts, with perpetual systole and diastole of their diaphanous envelopes: some, of translucent azure or rose, seem in the flood the shadows or ghosts of huge campanulate flowers; others have the semblance of strange living vegetables,-great milky tubers, just beginning to sprout. But woe to the human skin grazed by those shadowy sproutings and spectral stamens! - the touch of glowing iron is not more painful. Within an hour or two after their appearance all these tremulous jellies vanish mysteriously as they came. Perhaps, if a bold swimmer, you may venture out alone a long way once! Not twice! - even in company. As the water deepens beneath you, and you feel those ascending wave-currents of coldness arising which bespeak profundity, you will also begin to feel innumerable touches, as of groping fingers-touches of the bodies of fish, innumerable fish, fleeing towards shore. The farther you advance, the more thickly you will feel them come; and above you and around you, to right and left, others will leap and fall so swiftly as to daze the sight, like intercrossing fountain-jets of fluid silver. The gulls fly lower about you, circling with sinister squeaking cries; perhaps for an instant your feet touch in the deep something heavy, swift, lithe, that rushes past with a swirling shock. Then the fear of the Abyss, the vast and voiceless Nightmare of the Sea, will come upon you; the silent panic of all those opaline millions that flee glimmering by will enter into you also. From what do they flee thus perpetually? Is it from the giant sawfish or the ravening shark? - from the herds of the porpoises, or from the grande-écaille,that splendid monster whom no net may hold, all helmed and armored in argent 55 plate-mail? or from the hideous devilfish of the Gulf,- gigantic, flat-bodied, black, with immense side-fins ever outspread like the pinions of a bat,- the ter |