Part 4

So I entered, and idled awhile among the palms that threw spidery shadows under the noon-light; and I deciphered the old inscription upon the coquina pillar:--'PLAZA DE LA CONSTITUCION...;'--paying little heed to the song of the artesian spring, and scarcely vouchsafing a furtive glance to the newer monument, which I saw was not artistic, not imposing, but naïve and almost cumbrous. Suddenly my indifferent eye noted a graven word which revealed that the newer structure had been erected by Love, and for Love's sake only. And then, all unexpectedly, the very artlessness of the monument touched me as with a voiceless reproach,--touched me like the artlessness of a face in tears: so much of tender pain revealed itself through the simplicity of the chiseled words, OUR DEAD,--through the commonplaceness of the inscription, '_Erected by the Ladies' Memorial Association_.' Then I walked around the monument, perusing on each of its white faces the roll-call of the dead,--sons, brothers, lovers,--the names of your darlings, gentle women of Saint Augustine! I read them every one; carefully spelling out many a Spanish name of Andalusian origin: sonorous appellations holding in their syllables etymological suggestions of Arabian ancestry--names swarthy and beautiful as an Oriental face might be. And all the while, --dominating the perfume of blossoms, and the keen sweet scent of aromatic grasses,--the sulphureous smell of the Volcanic spring came to me grimly through the warm aureate air,--like an odor of battles!

There was a name upon that white stone which affected me in a singular way,--a name that by contrast with those dark Spanish ones seemed fair, blonde as gold! In someplace--at some time, I had known that name.--But where?--but when?

Even as a perfume may create for us the spectre of a vanished day, or as a melody may suddenly evoke for us the forgotten tone of some dear voice,--so may the sound or sight of a name momentarily revive for us all the faded colors of some memory-portrait so beautiful, so beloved, that we had become afraid to look at it, and had permitted innumerable spiders of Monotony to weave their tintless gauze before its face. But we have had experiences which are now so long dead and so profoundly sepultured in the Cemetery of Recollection that no mnemonic necromancy can lend them recognizable outline; they have become totally spiritualized, and reveal themselves only as faint wind-stirrings in the atmosphere of Thought.

Surely the experience connected in some vague way with that blonde name must have belonged to these:--the memory _had_ been; for I knew the presence of its ghost; but viewless it obstinately remained.

It pursued me through the amber afternoon. By some inexplicable mental process I discovered that it had been also associated with an idea of death, a melancholy fancy, at the time, that I had heard or had seen it before.--But when?--but where did I first learn that name? ... Night came, but brought with it no answer to the enigma.

I watched the moon,--a new moon, yellow and curved like a young banana,--droop over the dreaming sea: there were sparklings like effervescence through the archway of stars,--perhaps the molecular motion of some Astral Thought. Then seemed to fall upon the world a hush like the hush of sanctuaries,--like that _Silence of Secrets_ told of in the Bhagavad-Gita: the peace of the Immensities. In such hours fancies come to us like gusts of seawind,--as vast and pure; nay, sometimes vaster,--measureless like the interspaces between sun and sun. For it is only in these voiceless moments that the heavens speak to us,--telling of mysteries beyond the luminous signaling of astral deep unto astral deep, beyond the furthest burning of constellations; mysteries that shall still be mysteries when our day-star shall have yielded up his ghost of flame.--The death of a man; the death of a sun:--is the awful Universe affected any more by the last than by the first?

And with this question, the question of the morning returned, enigmatic as before,--bringing to me the indescribable, creeping, electrical sensation that we are said to feel especially when some heedless foot is treading the place of our future grave.

It was late when I sought sleep that night--my last Floridian night.

And I dreamed strange dreams.

First, I dreamed of a plant,--a plant with sombre cordiform leaves,--that _bent away from the light toward me_, and followed me persistently when I retreated from it; crawling like a pet reptile to get in front of me, and then rising up slowly, very slowly; stretching out to me, as with dumb affection, two helpless arms--two long leafy stems tipped with blood-colored flowers.

Then it seemed to me that I stood in a place of burial, and that, in some inexplicable way, I could observe the processes of that dark alchemy by which flesh is transmuted into leaf and fruit,--by which blood is transformed into blossom, as in the old Greek myths, and into the living substance also of those creatures, gem-winged, jewel-eyed, that feed upon the juices, the honey, and the fruit of graveyard flora. Then suddenly the mystery of the blonde name again came before me--this time upon a graven square of marble; and in a little while I thought I knew the story of the dead; for this impossible and nameless legend shaped itself in my sleep.

VULTUR AURA

_June_ 2, 188-

... _San Juan de los Pinos_:--'Saint John of the Pines,' That was the name of the ancient fort. And in those days the names of the bastions also were names of the Evangelists and the Apostles.

There is a ghostliness in the name! Why Saint John _of the pines_? Was this low shore beshadowed in the sixteenth century by pines tremendous, immemorial, more ancient than man,--through whose colossal aisles the sea-gusts spake with utterance vague and vast as the Wind of the Spirit? Did the roar of the far-off reef, the mutterings of the mighty woods, evoke for Spanish piety dim fancies of the Voices of Patmos, of the Thunders and the Trumpetings?

It was a timber stronghold only,--that forgotten fort, thus placed beneath the protection of weird Saint John,--a rampart-work of pine. Then were discovered the virtues of the coquina,--that wonderful shell-rock which seems marble half formed, half crystallized, under the pressure of shallow seas; and out of it was Fort San Marco built,--very solidly, very mathematically, very slowly,--by the labor of more than a century and the expenditure of thirty millions of good Spanish dollars. Two hundred and fifty years ago they began to build it; to-day it stands well-nigh as strong as in the time when Oglethorpe's English cannon played on it in vain. Now the profane Americano, who putteth no trust in saints, but in his own strength only, calleth it Fort Marion; and the lizards dwell in it; and the spider weaves her tapestries above its chapel-altar; and the dust is deep in the holy-water fonts, where Catholic swordsmen once dipped their sinewy hands. But over the great sally-port you may still discern the Arms of Spain,--the Crown, the Shield, the triple turrets of Castile, the rampant Lions of Leon, and, encircling these, the sculptured Order of the Fleece of Gold. Salty winds have chapped the relief;--the fingers of the rain have worn it down as the smooth face of a coin is worn;--the wings of Time have brushed away the edges of the tablet,--and besmirched the Fleece of Gold,--and obliterated, as in irony, the title of the King, and the beginning of the solemn inscription,--REYNANDO EN ESPANA. The REY is gone forever!--syllable and potentate! Underneath the pendant Lamb,--now black,--there are dark stains of drippings,--as of blood streaming over the stone. Nothing could be more grotesquely realistic than the sculptured helplessness of that Lamb; yet we may well doubt if he who chiseled it was moved by any spirit of sardonic symbolism,--any memory of those Argonauts of the sixteenth century, who found a new Colchis in the West, and a new Fleece, whereof the shearing yielded in less than one generation three hundred tons of gold.

Now the moat is haunted by lizards and lovers only; and there are buzzards upon the sentry towers; and there are bats in the barbican:--it is just sixty-five years since the last Spanish trooper tramped out of the sally-port, never to come back. But squamated as the structure is, the dignity of it imposes awe,--the antiquated vastness of it compels respect for the vanished grandeur of Spain; the majesty of its desolation is unspeakable.--I think one feels it most on wild days, when the mighty drum-roll of the breakers is sounded from the harbor bar, and the winds of the Atlantic blow their mad clarions in the barbican, and all the white cavalry of Ocean charge the long coral coast.

... A Shadow descends the counterscarp of the sea-battery,--passes the covered way,--crosses the ditch,--mounts the scarp,--vanishes beyond the bastions. A moment more and it reappears,--still coming from the sea; it is moving in circles with a swift swimming motion, as of an opaqueness floating vaguely in the humors of the eye. Now it is only a passing fleck, a shapeless blot; now it is the phantom of a boat.

Look up, into the brightness,--into the violet blaze!--behold him hovering in the splendor of heaven, sailing before the sun, that Kharkas, 'dwelling in decay,'--whom the Parsee reveres. (For't is written that even the flitting of his shadow over the faces of the dead driveth out the unclean spirit that entereth into corpses.) 'From the height of his highest flight he discerneth if there be upon the ground a morsel of flesh not bigger than a hand; and for his comfort the odor of musk hath been created underneath his wing,'--How magnificent his soaring!--yet the vast pinions never beat; they veer only with his wheeling,--sometimes presenting to the meridian their whole black banner-breadth,--sometimes offering only the sabre-curves of their edges. He seems to float by volition alone,--to swim the deeps of day without effort. Higher and higher he mounts into the abyss of light; now he seems to hang beside the sun!--now he is only a whirling speck!--now he is gone!--My field-glass brings him again into view for a moment--sailing, circling, spiring by turns; but once more he dwindles into a mote, not bigger than a tiny flake of soot, which rises up, up, up, and vanishes away at last into luminous eternities unfathomable. Yet from those invisible heights his eye still scans the face of the land and the features of men--that wondrous eye far reaching as a beam of daylight. 'There is a path,' saith Job, 'which no fowl knoweth, _and which the eye of the vulture hath not seen_--But that path lies not open to the gaze of the sun; for whatsoever earthly thing the day-star hath looked upon, that thing the ken of the vulture also hath discerned. Rightly, therefore, hath the eye of the vulture been mythologically likened unto the eye of deities and of demons. Was not the sacred symbol of Isis, the Impenetrably Veiled,--Isis, mother of Gods, 'Eye of the Sun,' who by the quivering of her feathers createth light, who by the beating of her wings createth spirit,--a Golden Vulture, the saving emblem hung about the throat of the dead? And the vultures of the Vedic prayer to Indra, all-seeing demons; great sun-vultures of the Sanscrit epic, demi-gods. By vision alone it was given the bird Gatayus to know the past, the present, and that which was to come; for, encompassing the world in his flight, all things were discerned by his gaze.

O ghoul of the empyrean, well doth thy brother, the Shadow-caster of deserts, know the time of the going and the coming of the caravans; and he maketh likewise each year the pilgrimage to the tomb of the Prophet!--Thy cousins sit upon the Towers of Silence; and the charnel-pits of the dakhmas have no secrets for them! From the eternal silences of heaven,--from the heights that are echoless and never reached by human cry,--progenitors of thine have watched the faces of the continents wrinkle in the revolution of centuries; they have looked down upon the migrations of races; they have witnessed the growth and the extinction of nations; they have read the crimson history of a hundred thousand wars.

Another shadow crosses my feet--and yet another passes; the orbits of their circlings intercross. Hanging above the dark fort, those black silhouettes cutting sharply athwart the azure seem grimly appropriate to this desolation. Doubtless the birds have haunted the coast for centuries. The Spaniard, who gave many a rich feast of eyes and hearts, has passed away;--the Vulture remains, and waits. For what?--is it for some vomit of the spuming sea,--some putrefaction of the buzzing shambles?--or does he, indeed, still hope, even after the passing of three hundred years, _for the return of Menendez?_

CREOLE PAPERS

QUAINT NEW ORLEANS AND ITS HABITANTS

I. FRENCH-TOWN

Old New Orleans proper (French-Town, as it is termed by steamboatmen; Le Carré, as its own inhabitants call it) is principally, though not wholly, comprised in the great quadrilateral bounded by Canal, Esplanade, Rampart, and Old Levee streets. Where the horse-cars now run upon those thoroughfares formerly stood the bastioned walls of the colonial city, encircled by a deep moat. Double rows of trees now mark the old rampart lines upon three sides of the quadrilateral, and birds sing in their branches at just the height where brazen cannon once showed their black throats, where Swiss or Spanish sentries paced to and fro against the sky. Within the Carr? the streets are serried, solid, and picturesque. Memories of aristocratic wealth still endure in certain vast mansions, broad-balconied and deep-courted, now mostly converted into hotels or lodging-houses, half the year void of guests; but the majority of the dwellings are rather curious than splendid. Nearly all the larger ones are built in the form of an L, the lower line of the letter representing the street front, the upper line a shallow but lofty wing reaching far back from the main building at right angles, and flanked by an enormous green or brown cistern as by a round tower. A really imposing archway often pierces the street façade--giving carriageway into the deep court--much like those quaint archways characteristic of old London taverns. Such a building often possesses three sets of stairways--invariably two--one for the main edifice, one for the wing. But these immense winter residences, once sheltering a population of servants and clients large as that comprised in the Roman _familia_, are now for the most part in a state of decay. There is much crumbling of wood-work, looseness of jointing, ulcerous exposure of the brick skeleton where plaster has rotted away in patches from piazza pillars and from the ribs of archways. Grass struggles up between the flagging; microscopic fungi patch the wall surfaces with sickly green. The semi-tropical forces of nature in the South are mighty to destroy the work of man. Dismally romantic is the Greek front upon Toulouse Street, in rear of the old Hôtel Saint Louis, and once famous as 'The Planters' Bank.' Through cracks in the high board fence erected about its desolation one may see the weeds squeezing their way through the joints of its broad stone steps, the green creepers wriggling round its columns, and bushes actually growing from the angles of its pediment--a vegetation planted, doubtless, by birds. This ruin has a veritable classic dignity--a melancholy that is antique. Sorrowful likewise are the voiceless courts of the once beautiful French hotel, with their void galleries above and dried-up fountains below. Millions upon millions have changed hands within that building; princely revels were held there of old by the feudal lords of Louisiana; the splendors of the past linger in the tarnished gilding and dying colors of the lofty apartments, and in the decorations of the porcelain dome frescoed by Casanova.

Many of the French and Spanish dwellings are as full of architectural mysteries and surprises as the Castle of Otranto--corridors that serpentine, stairways that leap from building to building, cabinets masked in the recesses of dormer-windows, curious covered bridges worthy of Venice. Looking up or down one of these streets, the eye is astonished by the long patch-work of colors motley as Joseph's coat, ultimately fading off into grayish-blues where the vista meets the horizon. Under the golden glow of the sun these tints take delightful warmth; there are chrome and gamboge yellows, deep-sea greens, ashen pinks, brick reds, chocolates, azures, blazing whites, all trimmed with the intenser green of iron balconies and the antiquated window-shutters folded back against the wall. The old French Opera-house I have seen painted in a peculiarly pleasing hue, to which a summer sun would lend the mellowness of antique marble. It was a ripe-ivorine tint, with just the faintest conceivable flush of pink; it was a warm and human color--it was the color of creole flesh!

Speaking of it recalls the curious statement of divers writers to the effect that the skin of the West Indian creole feels cooler than that of a European or American from the Northern States. The same is true of the Louisiana creole; the vigorous European or Northerner who touches a creole hand during the burning hours of a July or August day has reason to be surprised at its coolness--such a coolness as tropical fruits retain even under the perpendicular fires of an equatorial sun.

II THE CREOLES

When an educated resident of New Orleans speaks of the creoles he must be understood as referring to the descendants of the early Latin colonists, the posterity of those French and Spanish settlers who founded or ruled Louisiana. The diminutive _criollo_, derived from the Spanish _criar_, 'to beget,' primarily signified the colonial-born child of European blood, as distinguished from the offspring of the Conquistadores by slave women, whether Indian or African. Nothing could be more etymologically antithetical, therefore, than the phrase 'colored creoles,' although it has obtained considerable currency as a convenient term to distinguish those colored people who can claim a partly Latin origin, from the plainer 'American' colored folk who have neither French nor Spanish blood in their veins, and to whom the creole dialect is supremely unintelligible. Among the colored population of lighter tint, moreover, the characteristics of the Latin blood show themselves so strongly that the popular use of the term distinguishing them from ordinary types of mulatto, quadroon, quinteroon, or octoroon appears justifiable.

What old Bryan Edwards, in his excellent but obsolete 'History of the British West Indies;' wrote concerning the creoles of the Antilles, largely applies to the creoles of Louisiana likewise, especially in relation to their physical characteristics. In whatever part of the civilized Temperate Zone pronounced, the very word 'creole' conveys to the hearer fancies tropical as the poetry of Baudelaire; to the imagination of well-informed readers the creole invariably appears as a person of European blood corporeally and morally modified by the influences of a torrid climate. Whether we hear of the English creoles of the West Indian, East Indian, or West African colonies, the French creoles of Algeria, Martinique, or Senegal, or the Dutch creoles of Malabar, the name invariably provokes fancies of burning suns, of monstrous vegetation, of nights lighted by the Southern Cross. In New Orleans we are only at the Gate of the Tropics; sometimes our orange-trees shiver in frosty winds, our rare palms droop in January colds. But the climate is torrid enough nevertheless to have produced marked physical changes in the native white population of Louisiana during the lapse of generations. It has modified the osteogeny of the true creoles almost as remarkably as in Martinique or Trinidad; it has greatly deepened the eye-sockets to shelter the sight from the furnace glow of summer heat; it has made limbs suppler, extremities more delicate; and to these changes wrought in the body's framework is wholly attributable that languid and singular grace which distinguishes the _Louisianaise_ among her fairer American sisters. Creole eyes--the eyes that tantalized Gottschalk into the musical utterances of _Ojos Criollos_--are large, luminous, liquidly black, deeply fringed, and their darkness is strangely augmented by the uncommon depth of the orbit. The pilose system--to use anatomical phraseology---is richly developed; the women have magnificent hair, and creole beards and mustaches are usually very handsome. Formerly the Louisiana creoles excelled in exercises demanding grace and quickness of eye; they were fine dancers and famous swordsmen--indeed, the art of fencing is not yet lost among them. The beauty of the women is peculiar; they possess a _sveltesse_--a slender elegance that is very fascinating; but to Northerners they seem fragile of physique, more delicate than they really are. A rosy face, a bright, fresh complexion, is rarely seen among them; they have an ivorine tint, a convalescent pallor, that contrasts oddly with the fire of their dark pupils and the lustrous blackness of their hair. When the tint is darker,--a Spanish swarthiness,--the effect is less strange. Creole blondes are few.

The creole temperament is one of great nervous sensibility; phlegmatic characters are anomalies; a disposition to violent extremes of anger or affection is often masked by an exterior appearance of listless indifference. The climate itself (nine months of summer heat, three of snowless chill, long periods of heavy calm, broken by storms of extraordinary and splendid violence--a climate enervating, fitful, luxuriant) has reflected its characteristics in the native population. The mind develops precociously, blossoms richly. There are few educated creoles who cannot speak two or three languages well; many speak more; and the writer has known one who was almost a Mezzofanti. Love of the mother-country is not dead among the creoles, and their attachment to ancient French customs has but little abated. Their home life has scarcely changed during a century, although they are becoming less socially exclusive. Nevertheless, the Northern stranger invited to visit the home of a creole family may even now consider himself the subject of a rare compliment. Such a visit, however, will scarcely be made within the limits of the old colonial city, for the creoles are no longer there. They have moved away to newer districts north and south--away from the decaying streets and the crumbling cemeteries--out to quiet suburbs where the air is sweet with breath of jasmine flowers and orange-blossoms, out to dreamy Bayou Saint Jean, where clusters of white-pillared cottages slumber in green. They have mostly abandoned the Carré to the European Latins--French emigrants from the Mediterranean coasts, Italians, Sicilians, Spaniards, Greeks; to the population of the French Market, the venders of fruits and meats; to the keepers of what Sala called 'absurd little shops'; and especially to the French-speaking element of color, which still clings to the ruined Past with something of the strange affection that erst subsisted between master and slave.