Chapter 3

There are regions of Louisiana coast whose aspect seems not of the present, but of the immemorial past--of that epoch when low flat reaches of primordial continent first rose into form above a Silurian Sea. To indulge this geologic dream, any fervid and breezeless day there, it is only necessary to ignore the evolutional protests of a few blue asters or a few composite flowers of the coryopsis sort, which contrive to display their rare flashes of color through the general waving of cat-heads, blood-weeds, wild cane, and marsh grasses. For, at a hasty glance, the general appearance of this marsh verdure is vague enough, as it ranges away towards the sand, to convey the idea of amphibious vegetation,--a primitive flora as yet undecided whether to retain marine habits and forms, or to assume terrestrial ones;--and the occasional inspection of surprising shapes might strengthen this fancy. Queer flat-lying and many-branching things, which resemble sea-weeds in juiciness and color and consistency, crackle under your feet from time to time; the moist and weighty air seems heated rather from below than from above,--less by the sun than by the radiation of a cooling world; and the mists of morning or evening appear to simulate the vapory exhalation of volcanic forces,--latent, but only dozing, and uncomfortably close to the surface. And indeed geologists have actually averred that those rare elevations of the soil,--which, with their heavy coronets of evergreen foliage, not only look like islands, but are so called in the French nomenclature of the coast,--have been prominences created by ancient mud volcanoes.

The family of a Spanish fisherman, Feliu Viosca, once occupied and gave its name to such an islet, quite close to the Gulf-shore,--the loftiest bit of land along fourteen miles of just such marshy coast as I have spoken of. Landward, it dominated a desolation that wearied the eye to look at, a wilderness of reedy sloughs, patched at intervals with ranges of bitter-weed, tufts of elbow-bushes, and broad reaches of saw-grass, stretching away to a bluish-green line of woods that closed the horizon, and imperfectly drained in the driest season by a slimy little bayou that continually vomited foul water into the sea. The point had been much discussed by geologists; it proved a godsend to United States surveyors weary of attempting to take observations among quagmires, moccasins, and arborescent weeds from fifteen to twenty feet high. Savage fishermen, at some unrecorded time, had heaped upon the eminence a hill of clam-shells,--refuse of a million feasts; earth again had been formed over these, perhaps by the blind agency of worms working through centuries unnumbered; and the new soil had given birth to a luxuriant vegetation. Millennial oaks interknotted their roots below its surface, and vouchsafed protection to many a frailer growth of shrub or tree,--wild orange, water-willow, palmetto, locust, pomegranate, and many trailing tendrilled things, both green and gray. Then,--perhaps about half a century ago,--a few white fishermen cleared a place for themselves in this grove, and built a few palmetto cottages, with boat-houses and a wharf, facing the bayou. Later on this temporary fishing station became a permanent settlement: homes constructed of heavy timber and plaster mixed with the trailing moss of the oaks and cypresses took the places of the frail and fragrant huts of palmetto. Still the population itself retained a floating character: it ebbed and came, according to season and circumstances, according to luck or loss in the tilling of the sea. Viosca, the founder of the settlement, always remained; he always managed to do well.

He owned several luggers and sloops, which were hired out upon excellent terms; he could make large and profitable contracts with New Orleans fish-dealers; and he was vaguely suspected of possessing more occult resources. There were some confused stories current about his having once been a daring smuggler, and having only been reformed by the pleadings of his wife Carmen,--a little brown woman who had followed him from Barcelona to share his fortunes in the western world.

On hot days, when the shade was full of thin sweet scents, the place had a tropical charm, a drowsy peace. Nothing except the peculiar appearance of the line of oaks facing the Gulf could have conveyed to the visitor any suggestion of days in which the trilling of crickets and the fluting of birds had ceased, of nights when the voices of the marsh had been hushed for fear. In one enormous rank the veteran trees stood shoulder to shoulder, but in the attitude of giants over mastered,--forced backward towards the marsh,--made to recoil by the might of the ghostly enemy with whom they had striven a thousand years,--the Shrieker, the Sky-Sweeper, the awful Sea-Wind!

Never had he given them so terrible a wrestle as on the night of the tenth of August, eighteen hundred and fifty-six. All the waves of the excited Gulf thronged in as if to see, and lifted up their voices, and pushed, and roared, until the cheniere was islanded by such a billowing as no white man's eyes had ever looked upon before. Grandly the oaks bore themselves, but every fibre of their knotted thews was strained in the unequal contest, and two of the giants were overthrown, upturning, as they fell, roots coiled and huge as the serpent-limbs of Titans. Moved to its entrails, all the islet trembled, while the sea magnified its menace, and reached out whitely to the prostrate trees; but the rest of the oaks stood on, and strove in line, and saved the habitations defended by them ...

II.

Before a little waxen image of the Mother and Child,--an odd little Virgin with an Indian face, brought home by Feliu as a gift after one of his Mexican voyages,--Carmen Viosca had burned candles and prayed; sometimes telling her beads; sometimes murmuring the litanies she knew by heart; sometimes also reading from a prayer-book worn and greasy as a long-used pack of cards. It was particularly stained at one page, a page on which her tears had fallen many a lonely night--a page with a clumsy wood cut representing a celestial lamp, a symbolic radiance, shining through darkness, and on either side a kneeling angel with folded wings. And beneath this rudely wrought symbol of the Perpetual Calm appeared in big, coarse type the title of a prayer that has been offered up through many a century, doubtless, by wives of Spanish mariners,--Contra las Tempestades.

Once she became very much frightened. After a partial lull the storm had suddenly redoubled its force: the ground shook; the house quivered and creaked; the wind brayed and screamed and pushed and scuffled at the door; and the water, which had been whipping in through every crevice, all at once rose over the threshold and flooded the dwelling. Carmen dipped her finger in the water and tasted it. It was salt!

And none of Feliu's boats had yet come in;--doubtless they had been driven into some far-away bayous by the storm. The only boat at the settlement, the Carmencita, had been almost wrecked by running upon a snag three days before;--there was at least a fortnight's work for the ship-carpenter of Dead Cypress Point. And Feliu was sleeping as if nothing unusual had happened--the heavy sleep of a sailor, heedless of commotions and voices. And his men, Miguel and Mateo, were at the other end of the cheniere.

With a scream Carmen aroused Feliu. He raised himself upon his elbow, rubbed his eyes, and asked her, with exasperating calmness, "Que tienes? que tienes?" (What ails thee?)

--"Oh, Feliu! the sea is coming upon us!" she answered, in the same tongue. But she screamed out a word inspired by her fear: she did not cry, "Se nos viene el mar encima!" but "Se nos viene LA ALTURA!"--the name that conveys the terrible thought of depth swallowed up in height,--the height of the high sea.

"No lo creo!" muttered Feliu, looking at the floor; then in a quiet, deep voice he said, pointing to an oar in the corner of the room, "Echame ese remo."

She gave it to him. Still reclining upon one elbow, Feliu measured the depth of the water with his thumb nail upon the blade of the oar, and then bade Carmen light his pipe for him. His calmness reassured her. For half an hour more, undismayed by the clamoring of the wind or the calling of the sea, Feliu silently smoked his pipe and watched his oar. The water rose a little higher, and he made another mark;--then it climbed a little more, but not so rapidly; and he smiled at Carmen as he made a third mark. "Como creia!" he exclaimed, "no hay porque asustarse: el agua baja!" And as Carmen would have continued to pray, he rebuked her fears, and bade her try to obtain some rest:

"Basta ya de plegarios, querida!--vete y duerme." His tone, though kindly, was imperative; and Carmen, accustomed to obey him, laid herself down by his side, and soon, for very weariness, slept.

It was a feverish sleep, nevertheless, shattered at brief intervals by terrible sounds, sounds magnified by her nervous condition--a sleep visited by dreams that mingled in a strange way with the impressions of the storm, and more than once made her heart stop, and start again at its own stopping. One of these fancies she never could forget--a dream about little Concha,--Conchita, her firstborn, who now slept far away in the old churchyard at Barcelona. She had tried to become resigned,--not to think. But the child would come back night after night, though the earth lay heavy upon her--night after night, through long distances of Time and Space. Oh! the fancied clinging of infant-lips!--the thrilling touch of little ghostly hands!--those phantom-caresses that torture mothers' hearts! ... Night after night, through many a month of pain. Then for a time the gentle presence ceased to haunt her,--seemed to have lain down to sleep forever under the high bright grass and yellow flowers. Why did it return, that night of all nights, to kiss her, to cling to her, to nestle in her arms?

For in her dream she thought herself still kneeling before the waxen Image, while the terrors of the tempest were ever deepening about her,--raving of winds and booming of waters and a shaking of the land. And before her, even as she prayed her dream-prayer, the waxen Virgin became tall as a woman, and taller,--rising to the roof and smiling as she grew. Then Carmen would have cried out for fear, but that something smothered her voice,--paralyzed her tongue. And the Virgin silently stooped above her, and placed in her arms the Child,--the brown Child with the Indian face. And the Child whitened in her hands and changed,--seeming as it changed to send a sharp pain through her heart: an old pain linked somehow with memories of bright windy Spanish hills, and summer scent of olive groves, and all the luminous Past;--it looked into her face with the soft dark gaze, with the unforgotten smile of ... dead Conchita!

And Carmen wished to thank; the smiling Virgin for that priceless bliss, and lifted up her eyes, but the sickness of ghostly fear returned upon her when she looked; for now the Mother seemed as a woman long dead, and the smile was the smile of fleshlessness, and the places of the eyes were voids and darknesses ... And the sea sent up so vast a roar that the dwelling rocked.

Carmen started from sleep to find her heart throbbing so that the couch shook with it. Night was growing gray; the door had just been opened and slammed again. Through the rain-whipped panes she discerned the passing shape of Feliu, making for the beach--a broad and bearded silhouette, bending against the wind. Still the waxen Virgin smiled her Mexican smile,--but now she was only seven inches high; and her bead-glass eyes seemed to twinkle with kindliness while the flame of the last expiring taper struggled for life in the earthen socket at her feet.

III.

Rain and a blind sky and a bursting sea Feliu and his men, Miguel and Mateo, looked out upon the thundering and flashing of the monstrous tide. The wind had fallen, and the gray air was full of gulls. Behind the cheniere, back to the cloudy line of low woods many miles away, stretched a wash of lead-colored water, with a green point piercing it here and there--elbow-bushes or wild cane tall enough to keep their heads above the flood. But the inundation was visibly decreasing;--with the passing of each hour more and more green patches and points had been showing themselves: by degrees the course of the bayou had become defined--two parallel winding lines of dwarf-timber and bushy shrubs traversing the water toward the distant cypress-swamps. Before the cheniere all the shell-beach slope was piled with wreck--uptorn trees with the foliage still fresh upon them, splintered timbers of mysterious origin, and logs in multitude, scarred with gashes of the axe. Feliu and his comrades had saved wood enough to build a little town,--working up to their waists in the surf, with ropes, poles, and boat-hooks. The whole sea was full of flotsam. Voto a Cristo!--what a wrecking there must have been! And to think the Carmencita could not be taken out!

They had seen other luggers making eastward during the morning--could recognize some by their sails, others by their gait,--exaggerated in their struggle with the pitching of the sea: the San Pablo, the Gasparina, the Enriqueta, the Agueda, the Constanza. Ugly water, yes!--but what a chance for wreckers! ... Some great ship must have gone to pieces;--scores of casks were rolling in the trough,--casks of wine. Perhaps it was the Manila,--perhaps the Nautilus!

A dead cow floated near enough for Mateo to throw his rope over one horn; and they all helped to get it out. It was a milch cow of some expensive breed; and the owner's brand had been burned upon the horns:--a monographic combination of the letters A and P. Feliu said he knew that brand: Old-man Preaulx, of Belle-Isle, who kept a sort of dairy at Last Island during the summer season, used to mark all his cows that way. Strange!

But, as they worked on, they began to see stranger things,--white dead faces and dead hands, which did not look like the hands or the faces of drowned sailors: the ebb was beginning to run strongly, and these were passing out with it on the other side of the mouth of the bayou;--perhaps they had been washed into the marsh during the night, when the great rush of the sea came. Then the three men left the water, and retired to higher ground to scan the furrowed Gulf;--their practiced eyes began to search the courses of the sea-currents,--keen as the gaze of birds that watch the wake of the plough. And soon the casks and the drift were forgotten; for it seemed to them that the tide was heavy with human dead--passing out, processionally, to the great open. Very far, where the huge pitching of the swells was diminished by distance into a mere fluttering of ripples, the water appeared as if sprinkled with them;--they vanished and became visible again at irregular intervals, here and there--floating most thickly eastward!--tossing, swaying patches of white or pink or blue or black each with its tiny speck of flesh-color showing as the sea lifted or lowered the body. Nearer to shore there were few; but of these two were close enough to be almost recognizable: Miguel first discerned them. They were rising and falling where the water was deepest--well out in front of the mouth of the bayou, beyond the flooded sand-bars, and moving toward the shell-reef westward. They were drifting almost side by side. One was that of a negro, apparently well attired, and wearing a white apron;--the other seemed to be a young colored girl, clad in a blue dress; she was floating upon her face; they could observe that she had nearly straight hair, braided and tied with a red ribbon. These were evidently house-servants,--slaves. But from whence? Nothing could be learned until the luggers should return; and none of them was yet in sight. Still Feliu was not anxious as to the fate of his boats, manned by the best sailors of the coast. Rarely are these Louisiana fishermen lost in sudden storms; even when to other eyes the appearances are most pacific and the skies most splendidly blue, they divine some far-off danger, like the gulls; and like the gulls also, you see their light vessels fleeing landward. These men seem living barometers, exquisitely sensitive to all the invisible changes of atmospheric expansion and compression; they are not easily caught in those awful dead calms which suddenly paralyze the wings of a bark, and hold her helpless in their charmed circle, as in a nightmare, until the blackness overtakes her, and the long-sleeping sea leaps up foaming to devour her.

--"Carajo!"

The word all at once bursts from Feliu's mouth, with that peculiar guttural snarl of the "r" betokening strong excitement,--while he points to something rocking in the ebb, beyond the foaming of the shell-reef, under a circling of gulls. More dead? Yes--but something too that lives and moves, like a quivering speck of gold; and Mateo also perceives it, a gleam of bright hair,--and Miguel likewise, after a moment's gazing. A living child;--a lifeless mother. Pobrecita! No boat within reach, and only a mighty surf-wrestler could hope to swim thither and return!

But already, without a word, brown Feliu has stripped for the struggle;--another second, and he is shooting through the surf, head and hands tunnelling the foam hills.... One--two--three lines passed!--four!--that is where they first begin to crumble white from the summit,--five!--that he can ride fearlessly! ... Then swiftly, easily, he advances, with a long, powerful breast-stroke,--keeping his bearded head well up to watch for drift,--seeming to slide with a swing from swell to swell,--ascending, sinking,--alternately presenting breast or shoulder to the wave; always diminishing more and more to the eyes of Mateo and Miguel,--till he becomes a moving speck, occasionally hard to follow through the confusion of heaping waters ... You are not afraid of the sharks, Feliu!--no: they are afraid of you; right and left they slunk away from your coming that morning you swam for life in West-Indian waters, with your knife in your teeth, while the balls of the Cuban coast-guard were purring all around you. That day the swarming sea was warm,--warm like soup--and clear, with an emerald flash in every ripple,--not opaque and clamorous like the Gulf today ... Miguel and his comrade are anxious. Ropes are unrolled and inter-knotted into a line. Miguel remains on the beach; but Mateo, bearing the end of the line, fights his way out,--swimming and wading by turns, to the further sandbar, where the water is shallow enough to stand in,--if you know how to jump when the breaker comes.

But Feliu, nearing the flooded shell-bank, watches the white flashings,--knows when the time comes to keep flat and take a long, long breath. One heavy volleying of foam,--darkness and hissing as of a steam-burst; a vibrant lifting up; a rush into light,--and again the volleying and the seething darkness. Once more,--and the fight is won! He feels the upcoming chill of deeper water,--sees before him the green quaking of unbroken swells,--and far beyond him Mateo leaping on the bar,--and beside him, almost within arm's reach, a great billiard-table swaying, and a dead woman clinging there, and ... the child.

A moment more, and Feliu has lifted himself beside the waifs ... How fast the dead woman clings, as if with the one power which is strong as death,--the desperate force of love! Not in vain; for the frail creature bound to the mother's corpse with a silken scarf has still the strength to cry out:--"Maman! maman!" But time is life now; and the tiny hands must be pulled away from the fair dead neck, and the scarf taken to bind the infant firmly to Feliu's broad shoulders,--quickly, roughly; for the ebb will not wait ...

And now Feliu has a burden; but his style of swimming has totally changed;--he rises from the water like a Triton, and his powerful arms seem to spin in circles, like the spokes of a flying wheel. For now is the wrestle indeed!--after each passing swell comes a prodigious pulling from beneath,--the sea clutching for its prey.

But the reef is gained, is passed;--the wild horses of the deep seem to know the swimmer who has learned to ride them so well. And still the brown arms spin in an ever-nearing mist of spray; and the outer sand-bar is not far off,--and there is shouting Mateo, leaping in the surf, swinging something about his head, as a vaquero swings his noose! ... Sough! splash!--it struggles in the trough beside Feliu, and the sinewy hand descends upon it. Tiene!--tira, Miguel! And their feet touch land again! ...

She is very cold, the child, and very still, with eyes closed.

--"Esta muerta, Feliu?" asks Mateo.

--"No!" the panting swimmer makes answer, emerging, while the waves reach whitely up the sand as in pursuit,--"no; vive! respira todavia!"

Behind him the deep lifts up its million hands, and thunders as in acclaim.

IV.

--"Madre de Dios!--mi sueno!" screamed Carmen, abandoning her preparations for the morning meal, as Feliu, nude, like a marine god, rushed in and held out to her a dripping and gasping baby-girl,--"Mother of God! my dream!" But there was no time then to tell of dreams; the child might die. In one instant Carmen's quick, deft hands had stripped the slender little body; and while Mateo and Feliu were finding dry clothing and stimulants, and Miguel telling how it all happened--quickly, passionately, with furious gesture,--the kind and vigorous woman exerted all her skill to revive the flickering life. Soon Feliu came to aid her, while his men set to work completing the interrupted preparation of the breakfast. Flannels were heated for the friction of the frail limbs; and brandy-and-water warmed, which Carmen administered by the spoonful, skilfully as any physician,--until, at last, the little creature opened her eyes and began to sob. Sobbing still, she was laid in Carmen's warm feather-bed, well swathed in woollen wrappings. The immediate danger, at least, was over; and Feliu smiled with pride and pleasure.

Then Carmen first ventured to relate her dream; and his face became grave again. Husband and wife gazed a moment into each other's eyes, feeling together the same strange thrill--that mysterious faint creeping, as of a wind passing, which is the awe of the Unknowable. Then they looked at the child, lying there, pink checked with the flush of the blood returning; and such a sudden tenderness touched them as they had known long years before, while together bending above the slumbering loveliness of lost Conchita.

--"Que ojos!" murmured Feliu, as he turned away,--feigning hunger ... (He was not hungry; but his sight had grown a little dim, as with a mist.) Que ojos! They were singular eyes, large, dark, and wonderfully fringed. The child's hair was yellow--it was the flash of it that had saved her; yet her eyes and brows were beautifully black. She was comely, but with such a curious, delicate comeliness--totally unlike the robust beauty of Concha ... At intervals she would moan a little between her sobs; and at last cried out, with a thin, shrill cry: "Maman!--oh! maman!" Then Carmen lifted her from the bed to her lap, and caressed her, and rocked her gently to and fro, as she had done many a night for Concha,--murmuring,--"Yo sere tu madre, angel mio, dulzura mia;--sere tu madrecita, palomita mia!" (I will be thy mother, my angel, my sweet;--I will be thy little mother, my doveling.) And the long silk fringes of the child's eyes overlapped, shadowed her little cheeks; and she slept--just as Conchita had slept long ago,--with her head on Carmen's bosom.