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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
that while the waters of the basin were cool as the flow of a mountain
spring, the leaping column of living crystal in its centre was warm as
blood!
.........
I felt an inexpressible exhilaration from my strange bath; I gamboled in
the water like a boy; I even cried aloud to the woods and the birds; and
the parrots shouted back my cries from the heights of the palms. And,
leaving the fountain, I felt no fatigue or hunger; but when I lay down a
deep and leaden sleep came upon me,—such a sleep as a child sleeps in
the arms of its mother.
.........
When I awoke a woman was bending over me. She was wholly unclad,
and with her perfect beauty and the tropical tint of her skin, she looked
like a statue of amber. Her flowing black hair was interwoven with white
flowers; her eyes were very large, and dark and deep, and fringed with
silky lashes. She wore no ornaments of gold, like the Indian girls I had
seen—only the white flowers in her hair. I looked at her wonderingly as
upon an angel; and with her tall and slender grace she seemed to me,
indeed, of another world. For the first time in all that dark life of mine, I
felt fear in the presence of a woman; but a fear not unmixed with
pleasure. I spoke to her in Spanish; but she only opened her dark eyes
more widely, and smiled. I made signs; she brought me fruits and clear
water in a gourd; and as she bent over me again, I kissed her.
.........
Why should I tell of our love, Padre?—let me only say that those were
the happiest years of my life. Earth and heaven seemed to have
embraced in that strange land; it was Eden; it was paradise; never-
wearying love, eternal youth! No other mortal ever knew such happiness
as I;—yet none ever suffered so agonizing a loss. We lived upon fruits
and the water of the Fountain;—our bed was the moss and the flowers;
the doves were our playmates;—the stars our lamps. Never storm or
cloud;—never rain or heat;—only the tepid summer drowsy with sweet
odors, the songs of birds and murmuring water; the waving palms, the
jewel-breasted minstrels of the woods who chanted to us through the
night. And we never left the little valley. My armor and my good rapier
rusted away; my garments were soon worn out; but there we needed
no raiment, it was all warmth and light and repose. "We shall never
grow old here," she whispered. But when I asked her if that was,
indeed, the Fountain of Youth, she only smiled and placed her finger
upon her lips. Neither could I ever learn her name. I could not acquire
her tongue; yet she had learned mine with marvelous quickness. We
never had a quarrel;—I could never find heart to even frown upon her.
She was all gentleness, playfulness, loveliness—but what do you care,
Padre, to hear all these things?
.........
Did I say our happiness was perfect? No: there was one strange cause
of anxiety which regularly troubled me. Each night, while lying in her
arms, I heard the Spanish bugle-call—far and faint and ghostly as a
voice from the dead. It seemed like a melancholy voice calling to me.
And whenever the sound floated to us, I felt that she trembled, and
wound her arms faster about me, and she would weep until I kissed
away her tears. And through all those years I heard the bugle-call. Did I
say years?—nay, centuries!—for in that land one never grows old; I
heard it through centuries after all my companions were dead.

The priest crossed himself under the lamplight, and murmured a

prayer. "Continue, hijo mio," he said at last; "tell me all."

It was anger, Padre; I wished to see for myself where the sounds came
from that tortured my life. And I know not why she slept so deeply that
night. As I bent over to kiss her, she moaned in her dreams, and I saw a
crystal tear glimmer on the dark fringe of her eyes—and then that
cursed bugle-call—

The old man's voice failed a moment. He gave a feeble cough, spat
blood, and went on:

I have little time to tell you more, Padre. I never could find my way back
again to the valley. I lost her forever. When I wandered out among men,
they spoke another language that I could not speak; and the world was
changed. When I met Spaniards at last, they spoke a tongue unlike
what I heard in my youth. I did not dare to tell my story. They would
have confined me with madmen. I speak the Spanish of other centuries;
and the men of my own nation mock my quaint ways. Had I lived much
in this new world of yours, I should have been regarded as mad, for my
thoughts and ways are not of to-day; but I have spent my life among
the swamps of the tropics, with the python and the cayman, in the heart
of untrodden forests and by the shores of rivers that have no names,
and the ruins of dead Indian cities,—until my strength died and my hair
became white in looking for her.

"My son," cried the old priest, "banish these evil thoughts. I have
heard your story; and any, save a priest, would believe you mad. I
believe all you have told me;—the legends of the Church contain
much that is equally strange. You have been a great sinner in your
youth; and God has punished you by making your sins the very
instrument of your punishment. Yet has He not preserved you
through the centuries that you might repent? Banish all thoughts of
the demon who still tempts you in the shape of a woman; repent
and commend your soul to God, that I may absolve you."
"Repent!" said the dying man, fixing upon the priest's face his great
black eyes, which flamed up again as with the fierce fires of his
youth; "repent, father? I cannot repent! I love her!—I love her! And
if there be a life beyond death, I shall love her through all time and
eternity: more than my own soul I love her!—more than my hope of
heaven!—more than my fear of death and hell!"

The priest fell on his knees, and, covering his face, prayed fervently.
When he lifted his eyes again, the soul had passed away
unabsolved; but there was such a smile upon the dead face that the
priest wondered, and, forgetting the Miserere upon his lips,
involuntarily muttered: "He hath found Her at last." And the east
brightened; and touched by the magic of the rising sun, the mists
above his rising formed themselves into a Fountain of Gold.

A DEAD LOVE[19]
He knew no rest; for all his dreams were haunted by her; and when he
sought love, she came as the dead come between the living. So that,
weary of his life, he passed away at last in the fevered summer of a
tropical city; dying with her name upon his lips. And his face was no
more seen in the palm-shadowed streets; but the sun rose and sank as
before.
And that vague phantom life, which sometimes lives and thinks in the
tomb where the body moulders, lingered and thought within the narrow
marble bed where they laid him with the pious hope—que en paz
descanse!
Yet so weary of his life had the wanderer been that he could not even
find the repose of the dead. And while the body sank into dust the
phantom man found no rest in the darkness, and thought to himself, "I
am even too weary to rest!"
There was a fissure in the wall of the tomb. And through it, and through
the meshes of the web that a spider had spun across it, the dead
looked, and saw the summer sky blazing like amethyst; the palms
swaying in the breezes from the sea; the flowers in the shadows of the
sepulchres; the opal fires of the horizon; the birds that sang, and the
river that rolled its whispering waves between tall palms and vast-leaved
plants to the heaving emerald of the Spanish Main. The voices of
women and sounds of argentine laughter and of footsteps and of music,
and of merriment, also came through the fissure in the wall of the tomb;
sometimes also the noise of the swift feet of horses, and afar off the
drowsy murmur made by the toiling heart of the city. So that the dead
wished to live again; seeing that there was no rest in the tomb.
And the gold-born days died in golden fire;—and the moon whitened
nightly the face of the earth; and the perfume of the summer passed
away like a breath of incense;—but the dead in the sepulchre could not
wholly die.
The voices of life entered his resting-place; the murmur of the world
spoke to him in the darkness; the winds of the sea called to him through
the crannies of the tomb. So that he could not rest. And yet for the dead
there is no consolation of tears!
The stars in their silent courses looked down through the crannies of the
tomb and passed on; the birds sang above him and flew to other lands;
the lizards ran noiselessly above his bed of stone and as noiselessly
departed; the spider at last ceased to renew her web of magical silk; the
years came and went as before, but for the dead there was no rest!
And it came to pass that after many tropical moons had waxed and
waned, and the summer was come, with a presence sweet as a fair
woman's—making the drowsy air odorous about her—that she whose
name was uttered by his lips when the Shadow of Death fell upon him,
came to that city of palms, and to the ancient place of burial, and even
to the tomb that was nameless.
And he knew the whisper of her robes; and from the heart of the dead
man a flower sprang and passed through the fissure in the wall of the
tomb and blossomed before her and breathed out its soul in passionate
sweetness.
But she, knowing it not, passed by; and the sound of her footsteps died
away forever!

AT THE CEMETERY[20]

"Come with me," he said, "that you may see the contrast between
poverty and riches, between the great and the humble, even among the
ranks of the dead;—for verily it hath been said that there are sermons in
stones."
And I passed with him through the Egyptian gates, and beyond the
pylons into the Alley of Cypresses; and he showed me the dwelling-
place of the rich in the City of Eternal Sleep—the ponderous tombs of
carven marble, the white angels that mourned in stone, the pale
symbols of the urns, and the names inscribed upon tablets of granite in
letters of gold. But I said to him: "These things interest me not;—these
tombs are but traditions of the wealth once owned by men who dwell
now where riches avail nothing and all rest together in the dust."
Then my friend laughed softly to himself, and taking my hand led me to
a shadowy place where the trees bent under their drooping burdens of
gray moss, and made waving silhouettes against the catacombed walls
which girdle the cemetery. There the dead were numbered and piled
away thickly upon the marble shelves, like those documents which none
may destroy but which few care to read—the Archives of our Necropolis.
And he pointed to a marble tablet closing the aperture of one of the
little compartments in the lowest range of the catacombs, almost level
with the grass at our feet.
There was no inscription, no name, no wreath, no vase. But some hand
had fashioned a tiny flower-bed in front of the tablet—a little garden
about twelve inches in width and depth—and had hemmed it about with
a border of pink-tinted seashells, and had covered the black mould over
with white sand, through which the green leaves and buds of the baby
plants sprouted up.
"Nothing but love could have created that," said my companion, as a
shadow of tenderness passed over his face;—"and that sand has been
brought here from a long distance, and from the shores of the sea."
Then I looked and remembered wastes that I had seen, where sand-
waves shifted with a dry and rustling sound, where no life was and no
leaf grew, where all was death and barrenness. And here were flowers
blooming in the midst of sand!—the desert blossoming!—love living in
the midst of death! And I saw the print of a hand, a child's hand—the
tiny Angers that had made this poor little garden and smoothed the
sand over the roots of the flowers.
"There is no name upon the tomb," said the voice of the friend who
stood beside me; "yet why should there be?"
Why, indeed? I answered. Why should the world know the sweet secret
of that child's love? Why should unsympathetic eyes read the legend of
that grief? Is it not enough that those who loved the dead man know his
place of rest, and come hither to whisper to him in his dreamless sleep?
I said he; for somehow or other the sight of that little garden created a
strange fancy in my mind, a fancy concerning the dead. The shells and
the sand were not the same as those usually used in the cemeteries.
They had been brought from a great distance—from the moaning shores
of the Mexican Gulf.
So that visions of a phantom sea arose before me; and mystic ships
rocking in their agony upon shadowy waves;—and dreams of wild coasts
where the weed-grown skeletons of wrecks lie buried in the ribbed sand.
And I thought—Perhaps this was a sailor and perhaps the loving ones
who come at intervals to visit his place of rest waited and watched and
wept for a ship that never came back.
But when the sea gave up its dead, they bore him to his native city, and
laid him in this humble grave, and brought hither the sand that the
waves had kissed, and the pink-eared shells within whose secret spirals
the moan of ocean lingers forever.
And from time to time his child comes to plant a frail blossom, and
smooth the sand with her tiny fingers, talking softly the while—perhaps
only to herself—perhaps to that dead father who comes to her in
dreams.

"AÏDA"[21]

To Thebes, the giant city of a hundred gates, the city walled up to

heaven, come the tidings of war from the south. Dark Ethiopia has risen
against Egypt, the power "shadowing with wings" has invaded the
kingdom of the Pharaohs, to rescue from captivity the beautiful Aïda,
daughter of Amonasro, monarch of Ethiopia. Aïda is the slave of the
enchanting Amneris, daughter of Pharaoh. Radames, chief among the
great captains of Egypt, is beloved by Amneris; but he has looked upon
the beauty of the slave-maiden, and told her in secret the story of his
love.
And Radames, wandering through the vastness of Pharoah's palace,
dreams of Aïda, and longs for power. Visions of grandeur tower before
him like the colossi of Osiris in the temple courts; hopes and fears
agitate his soul, as varying winds from desert or sea bend the crests of
the dhoums to the four points of heaven. In fancy he finds himself
seated at the king's right hand, clad with the robes of honor, and
wearing the ring of might; second only to the most powerful of the
Pharaohs. He lifts Aïda to share his greatness; he binds her brows with
gold, and restores her to the land of her people. And even as he
dreams, Ramphis, the deep-voiced priest, draws nigh, bearing the
tidings of war and of battle-thunder rolling up from the land "shadowing
with wings," which is beyond the river of Ethiopia. The priest has
consulted with the Veiled Goddess—Isis, whose awful face no man may
see and live. And the Veiled One has chosen the great captain who shall
lead the hosts of Egypt. "O happy man!—would that it were I!" cries
Radames. But the priest utters not the name, and passes down the
avenue of mighty pillars, and out into the day beyond.
Amneris, the daughter of Pharaoh, speaks words of love to Radames.
His lips answer, but his heart is cold. And the subtle mind of the
Egyptian maiden divines the fatal secret. Shall she hate her slave?

The priests summon the people of Egypt together; the will of the
goddess is made manifest by the lips of Pharaoh himself. Radames shall
lead the hosts of Egypt against the dark armies of Ethiopia. A roar of
acclamation goes up to heaven. Aïda fears and weeps; it is against her
beloved father, Amonasro, that her lover must lead the armies of the
Nile. Radames is summoned to the mysterious halls of the Temple of
Phthah: through infinitely extending rows of columns illumined by holy
flames he is led to the inner sanctuary itself. The linen-mantled priest
performs the measure of their ancient and symbolic dance; the warriors
clad in consecrated armor; about his loins is girt a sacred sword; and
the vast temple reëchoes through all its deeps of dimness the harmonies
of the awful hymn to the Eternal Spirit of Fire.
The ceremony is consummated.
The monarch proclaims tremendous war. Thebes opens her hundred
mouths of brass and vomits forth her nations of armies. The land shakes
to the earthquake of the chariot-roll; numberless as ears of corn are the
spear-blades of bronze;—the jaws of Egypt have opened to devour her
enemies!
Aïda has confessed her love in agony; Amneris has falsely told her that
her lover has fallen in battle. And the daughter of Pharaoh is strong and
jealous.

As the white moon moves around the earth, as the stars circle in Egypt's
rainless heaven, so circle the dancing-girls in voluptuous joy before the
king—gauze-robed or clad only with jeweled girdles;—their limbs, supple
as the serpents charmed by the serpent charmer, curve to the music of
harpers harping upon fantastic harps. The earth quakes again; there is a
sound in the distance as when a mighty tide approaches the land—a
sound as of the thunder-chanting sea. The hosts of Egypt return. The
chariots roar through the hundred gates of Thebes. Innumerable armies
defile before the granite terraces of the Palace. Radames comes in the
glory of his victory. Pharaoh descends from his throne to embrace him.
"Ask what thou wilt, O Radames, even though it be the half of my
kingdom!"
And Radames asks for the life of his captives. Amonasro is among
them; and Aïda, beholding him, fears with an exceeding great fear.
Yet none but she knows Amonasro; for he wears the garb of a
soldier—none but she, and Radames. The priests cry for blood. But
the king must keep his vow. The prisoners are set free. And
Radames must wed the tall and comely Amneris, Pharaoh's only
daughter.

It is night over Egypt. To Ramphis, the deep-voiced priest, tall

Amneris must go. It is the eve of her nuptials. She must pray to the
Veiled One, the mystic mother of love, to bless her happy union.
Within the temple burn the holy lights; incense smoulders in the
tripods of brass; solemn hymns resound through the vast-pillared
sanctuary. Without, under the stars, Aïda glides like a shadow to
meet her lover.

It is not her lover who comes. It is her father! "Aïda," mutters the
deep but tender voice of Amonasro, "thou hast the daughter of
Pharaoh in thy power! Radames loves thee! Wilt thou see again the
blessed land of thy birth?—Wit thou inhale the balm of our forests?—
Wilt thou gaze upon our valleys and behold our temples of gold, and
pray to the gods of thy fathers? Then it will only be needful for thee
to learn what path the Egyptians will follow! Our people have risen
in arms again! Radames loves thee!—he will tell thee all! What! dost
thou hesitate? Refuse!—and they who died to free thee from
captivity shall arise from the black gulf to curse thee! Refuse!—and
the shade of thy mother will return from the tomb to curse thee!
Refuse!—and I, thy father, shall disown thee and invoke upon thy
head my everlasting curse!"

Radames comes! Amonasro, hiding in the shadow of the palms,

hears all. Radames betrays his country to Aïda. "Save thyself!—fly
with me!" she whispers to her lover. "Leave thy gods; we shall
worship together in the temples of my country. The desert shall be
our nuptial couch!—the silent stars the witness of our love. Let my
black hair cover thee as a tent; my eyes sustain thee; my kisses
console thee." And as she twines about him and he inhales the
perfume of her lips and feels the beating of her heart, Radames
forgets country and honor and faith and fame; and the fatal word is
spoken. Napata!—Amonasro, from the shadows of the palm-trees,
shouts the word in triumph! There is a clash of brazen blades;
Radames is seized by priests and soldiers: Amonasro and his
daughter fly under cover of the night.
Vainly tall Amneris intercedes with the deep-voiced priest. Ramphis
has spoken the word: "He shall die!" Vainly do the priests call upon
Radames to defend himself against their terrible accusations. His lips
are silent. He must die the death of traitors. They sentence him to
living burial under the foundations of the temple, under the feet of
the granite gods.

Under the feet of the deities they have made the tomb of Radames
—a chasm wrought in a mountain of hewn granite. Above it the
weird-faced gods with beards of basalt have sat for a thousand
years. Their eyes of stone have beheld the courses of the stars
change in heaven; generations have worshiped at their feet of
granite. Rivers have changed their courses; dynasties have passed
away since first they took their seats upon their thrones of mountain
rock, and placed their giant hands upon their knees. Changeless as
the granite hill from whose womb they were delivered by hieratic
art, they watch over the face of Egypt, far-gazing through the pillars
of the temple into the palm-shadowed valley beyond. Their will is
inexorable as the hard rock of which their forms are wrought; their
faces have neither pity nor mercy, because they are the faces of
gods!

The priests close up the tomb; they chant their holy and awful
hymn. Radames finds his Aïda beside him. She had concealed herself
in the darkness that she might die in his arms.
The footsteps of the priests, the sacred hymn, die away. Alone in the
darkness above, at the feet of the silent gods, there is a sound as of
a woman's weeping. It is Amneris, the daughter of the king. Below
in everlasting gloom the lovers are united at once in love and death.
And Osiris, forever impassible, gazes into the infinite night with
tearless eyes of stone.

EL VÓMITO[22]

The mother was a small and almost grotesque personage, with a

somewhat mediæval face, oaken colored and long and full of Gothic
angularity; only her eyes were young, full of vivacity and keen
comprehension. The daughter was tall and slight and dark; a skin
with the tint of Mexican gold; hair dead black and heavy with snaky
ripples in it that made one think of Medusa; eyes large and of almost
sinister brilliancy, heavily shadowed and steady as a falcon's; she
had that lengthened grace of dancing figures on Greek vases, but on
her face reigned the motionless beauty of bronze—never a smile or
frown. The mother, a professed sorceress, who told the fortunes of
veiled women by the light of a lamp burning before a skull, did not
seem to me half so weird a creature as the daughter. The girl always
made me think of Sou they's witch, kept young by enchantment to
charm Thalaba.

The house was a mysterious ruin: walls green with morbid

vegetation of some fungous kind; humid rooms with rotting furniture
of a luxurious and antiquated pattern; shrieking stairways; yielding
and groaning floors; corridors forever dripping with a cold sweat;
bats under the roof and rats under the floor; snails moving up and
down by night in wakes of phosphorescent slime; broken shutters,
shattered glass, lockless doors, mysterious icy draughts, and elfish
noises. Outside there was a kind of savage garden—torchon trees,
vines bearing spotted and suspicious flowers, Spanish bayonets
growing in broken urns, agaves, palmettoes, something that looked
like green elephant's ears, a monstrous and ill-smelling species of lily
with a phallic pistil, and many vegetable eccentricities I have never
seen before. In a little stable-yard at the farther end were dyspeptic
chickens, nostalgic ducks, and a most ancient and rheumatic horse,
whose feet were always in water, and who made nightmare
moanings through all the hours of darkness. There were also dogs
that never barked and spectral cats that never had a kittenhood. Still
the very ghastliness of the place had its fantastic charm for me. I
remained; the drowsy Southern spring came to vitalize vines and
lend a Japanese monstrosity to the tropical jungle under my
balconied window. Unfamiliar and extraordinary odors floated up
from the spotted flowers; and the snails crawled upstairs less
frequently than before. Then a fierce and fevered summer!

It was late in the night when I was summoned to the Cuban's

bedside: a night of such stifling and motionless heat as precedes a
Gulf storm: the moon, magnified by the vapors, wore a spectral
nimbus; the horizon pulsed with feverish lightnings. Its white flicker
made shadowy the lamp-flame in the sick-room at intervals. I bade
them close the windows. "El Vómito?"—already delirious; strange
ravings; the fine dark face phantom-shadowed by death; singular
and unfamiliar symptoms of pulsation and temperature;
extraordinary mental disturbance. Could this be Vómito? There was
an odd odor in the room—ghostly, faint, but sufficiently perceptible
to affect the memory:—I suddenly remembered the balcony
overhanging the African wildness of the garden, the strange vines
that clung with webbed feet to the ruined wall, and the peculiar,
heavy, sickly, somnolent smell of the spotted blossoms! And as I
leaned over the patient, I became aware of another perfume in the
room, a perfume that impregnated the pillow—the odor of a
woman's hair, the incense of a woman's youth mingling with the
phantoms of the flowers, as ambrosia with venom, life with death, a
breath from paradise with an exhalation from hell. From the
bloodless lips of the sufferer, as from the mouth of one oppressed by
some hideous dream, escaped the name of the witch's daughter.
And suddenly the house shuddered through all its framework, as if
under the weight of invisible blows: a mighty shaking of walls and
windows—the storm knocking at the door.

I found myself alone with her; the moans of the dying could not be
shut out; and the storm knocked louder and more loudly, demanding
entrance. "It is not the fever," I said. "I have lived in lands of
tropical fever; your lips are even now humid with his kisses, and you
have condemned him. My knowledge avails nothing against this
infernal craft; but I know also that you must know the antidote
which will baffle death;—this man shall not die!—I do not fear you!
—I will denounce you!—He shall not die!"
For the first time I beheld her smile—the smile of secret strength
that scorns opposition. Gleaming through the diaphanous whiteness
of her loose robe, the lamplight wrought in silhouette the serpentine
grace of her body like the figure of an Egyptian dancer in a mist of
veils, and her splendid hair coiled about her like the vipérine locks of
a gorgon.
"La voluntad de mi madre!" she answered calmly. "You are too late!
You shall not denounce us! Even could you do so, you could prove
nothing. Your science, as you have said, is worth nothing here. Do
you pity the fly that nourishes the spider? You shall do nothing so
foolish, señor doctor, but you will certify that the stranger has died
of the vómito. You do not know anything; you shall not know
anything. You will be recompensed. We are rich." Without, the
knocking increased, as if the thunder sought to enter: I, within,
looked upon her face, and the face was passionless and motionless
as the face of a woman of bronze.
She had not spoken, but I felt her serpent litheness wound about
me, her heart beating against my breast, her arms tightening about
my neck, the perfume of her hair and of her youth and of her breath
intoxicating me as an exhalation of enchantment. I could not speak;
I could not resist; spellbound by a mingling of fascination and
pleasure, witchcraft and passion, weakness and fear—and the storm
awfully knocked without, as if summoning the stranger; and his
moaning ceased.

Whence she came, the mother, I know not. She seemed to have
risen from beneath:
"The doctor is conscientious!—he cares for his patient well. The
stranger will need his excellent attention no more. The conscientious
doctor has accepted his recompense; he will certify what we desire—
will he not, hija mia?"
And the girl mocked me with her eyes, and laughed fiercely.

THE IDYL OF A FRENCH SNUFF-BOX[23]

The old Creole gentleman had forgotten his snuff-box—the snuff-box

he had carried constantly with him for thirty years, and which he had
purchased in Paris in days when Louisiana planters traveled through
Europe leaving a wake of gold behind them, the trail of a tropical
sunset of wealth. It was lying upon my table. Decidedly the old
gentleman's memory was failing!
There was a dream of Theocritus wrought upon the ivory lid of the
snuff-box, created by a hand so cunning that its work had withstood
unscathed all the accidents of thirty odd years of careless usage—a
slumbering dryad; an amorous faun!
The dryad was sleeping like a bacchante weary of love and wine,
half-lying upon her side; half upon her bosom, pillowing her
charming head upon one arm. Her bed was a mossy knoll; its front
transformed by artistic magic into one of those Renaissance scroll-
reliefs which are dreams of seashells; her ivory body moulded its
nudity upon the curve of the knoll with antique grace.
Above her crouched the faun—a beautiful and mischievous faun.
Lightly as a summer breeze, he lifted the robe she had flung over
herself, and gazed upon her beauty. But around her polished thigh
clung a loving snake, the guardian of her sleep; and the snake raised
its jeweled head and fixed upon the faun its glittering topaz eyes.
There the graven narrative closed its chapter of ivory: forever
provokingly motionless the lithe limbs of the dryad and the serpent
thigh-bracelet and the unhappily amorous faun holding the drapery
rigid in his outstretched hand.
I fell asleep, still haunted by the unfinished idyl. The night filled the
darkness with whispers and with dreams; and in a luminous cloud I
beheld again the faun and the sleeping nymph and the serpent with
topaz eyes coiled about her thigh.
Then the scene grew clear and large and warm; the figures moved
and lived. It was an Arcadian vale, myrtle-shadowed, and sweet with
the breath of summer winds. The brooks purled in the distance; bird
voices twittered in the rustling laurels; the sun's liquid gold filtered
through the leafy network above; the flowers swung their fragile
censers and sweetened all the place. I saw the smooth breast of the
faun rise and fall with his passionate panting; I fancied I could see
his heart beat. And the serpent stirred its jeweled head with the
topaz eyes.
Then the faun moved his lips in sound—a sound like the cooing of a
dove in the coming of summer, and an answering coo rippled out
from the myrtle trees. And softly as a flake of snow, a white-
bosomed thing with bright, gentle eyes alighted beside the faun, and
cooed and cooed again, and drew yet a little farther off and cooed
once more.
Then the serpent looked upon the dove—which is sacred to
Aphrodite—and glided from its smooth resting-place, as water glides
between the fingers of a hunter who drinks from the hollow of his
hand in hours of torrid heat and weariness. And the dove, still
retreating, drew after her the guardian snake with topaz eyes.
Then with all her body kissed by the summer breeze, the nymph
awoke, and her opening eyes looked into the eager eyes of the faun;
and she started not, neither did she seem afraid. And stretching
herself upon the soft moss after the refreshment of slumber, she
flung her rounded arms back, and linked them about the neck of the
faun; and they kissed each other, and the doves cooed in the
myrtles.
And from afar off came yet a sweeter sound than the caressing
voices of the doves—a long ripple of gentle melody, rising and falling
like the sighing of an amorous zephyr, melancholy yet pleasing like
the melancholy of love—Pan playing upon his pipe!—
There was a sudden knocking at the door:
"Pardon, mon jeune ami; j'oubliais ma tabatière! Ah! la voici! Je vous
remercie!"
Alas! the vision never returned! The idyl remains a fragment! I
cannot tell you what became of the dove and the serpent with topaz
eyes.

SPRING PHANTOMS[24]

The moon, descending her staircase of clouds in one of the "Petits

Poèmes en Prose," enters the chamber of a newborn child, and
whispers into his dreams: "Thou shalt love all that loves me—the
water that is formless and multiform, the vast green sea, the place
where thou shalt never be, the woman thou shalt never know."
For those of us thus blessed or cursed at our birth, this is perhaps
the special season of such dreams—of nostalgia, vague as the world-
sickness, for the places where we shall never be; and fancies as
delicate as arabesques of smoke concerning the woman we shall
never know. There is a languor in the air; the winds sleep; the
flowers exhale their souls in incense; near sounds seem distant, as if
the sense of time and space were affected by hashish; the sunsets
paint in the west pictures of phantom-gold, as of those islands at the
mere aspect of whose beauty crews mutinied and burned their
ships; plants that droop and cling assume a more feminine grace;
and the minstrel of Southern woods mingles the sweet rippling of his
mocking music with the moonlight.
There have been sailors who, flung by some kind storm-wave on the
shore of a Pacific Eden, to be beloved for years by some woman
dark but beautiful, subsequently returned by stealth to the turmoil of
civilization and labor, and vainly regretted, in the dust and roar and
sunlessness of daily toil, the abandoned paradise they could never
see again. Is it not such a feeling as this that haunts the mind in
springtime;—a faint nostalgic longing for the place where we shall
never be;—a vision made even more fairylike by such a vague dream
of glory as enchanted those Spanish souls who sought, and never
found El Dorado?
Each time the vision returns, is it not more enchanting than before,
as a recurring dream of the night in which we behold places we can
never see except through dream-haze, gilded by a phantom sun? It
is sadder each time, this fancy; for it brings with it the memory of
older apparitions, as of places visited in childhood, in that sweet dim
time so long ago that its dreams and realities are mingled together
in strange confusion, as clouds with waters.
Each year it comes to haunt us, like the vision of the Adelantado of
the Seven Cities—the place where we shall never be—and each year
there will be a weirder sweetness and a more fantastic glory about
the vision. And perhaps in the hours of the last beating of the heart,
before sinking into that abyss of changeless deeps above whose
shadowless sleep no dreams move their impalpable wings, we shall
see it once more, wrapped in strange luminosity, submerged in the
orange radiance of a Pacific sunset—the place where we shall never
be!
And the Woman that we shall never know!
She is the daughter of mist and light—a phantom bride who
becomes visible to us only during those magic hours when the moon
enchants the world; she is the most feminine of all sweetly feminine
things, the most complaisant, the least capricious. Hers is the
fascination of the succubus without the red thirst of the vampire.
She always wears the garb that most pleases us—when she wears
any; always adopts the aspect of beauty most charming to us—
blonde or swarthy, Greek or Egyptian, Nubian or Circassian. She fills
the place of a thousand odalisques, owns all the arts of the harem of
Solomon: all the loveliness we love retrospectively, all the charms we
worship in the present, are combined in her. She comes as the dead
come, who never speak; yet without speech she gratifies our
voiceless caprice. Sometimes we foolishly fancy that we discover in
some real, warm womanly personality, a trait or feature like unto
hers; but time soon unmasks our error. We shall never see her in the
harsh world of realities; for she is the creation of our own hearts,
wrought Pygmalion-wise, but of material too unsubstantial for even
the power of a god to animate. Only the dreams of Brahma himself
take substantial form: these are worlds and men and all their works,
which shall pass away like smoke when the preserver ceases his
slumber of a myriad million years.
She becomes more beautiful as we grow older—this phantom love,
born of the mist of poor human dreams—so fair and faultless that
her invisible presence makes us less reconciled to the frailties and
foibles of real life. Perhaps she too has faults; but she has no faults
for us except that of unsubstantially. Involuntarily we acquire the
unjust habit of judging real women by her spectral standard; and the
real always suffer for the ideal. So that when the fancy of a home
and children—smiling faces, comfort, and a woman's friendship, the
idea of something real to love and be loved by—comes to the
haunted man in hours of disgust with the world and weariness of its
hollow mockeries—the Woman that he shall never know stands
before him like a ghost with sweet sad eyes of warning—and he dare
not!

A KISS FANTASTICAL[25]

Curves of cheek and throat, and shadow of loose hair—the dark

flash of dark eyes under the silk of black lashes—a passing vision
light as a dream of summer—the sweet temptations of seventeen
years' grace—womanhood at its springtime, when the bud is
bursting through the blossom—the patter of feet that hardly touch
ground in their elastic movement—the light loose dress, moulding its
softness upon the limbs beneath it, betraying much, suggesting the
rest; an apparition seen only for a moment passing through the
subdued light of a vine-shaded window, briefly as an object
illuminated by lightning—yet such a moment may well be recorded
by the guardian angels of men's lives.

"Croyez-vous ça?" suddenly demands a metallically sonorous voice at

the other side of the table.
"Pardon!—qu'est ce que c'est?" asks the stranger, in the tone of one
suddenly awakened, internally annoyed at being disturbed, yet
anxious to appear deeply interested. They had been talking of Japan
—and the traveler, suddenly regaining the clue of the conversation,
spoke of a bath-house at Yokohama, and of strange things he had
seen there, until the memory of the recent vision mingled
fantastically with recollections of the Japanese bathing-house, and
he sank into another reverie, leaving the untasted cup of black
coffee before him to mingle its dying aroma with the odor of the
cigarettes.
For there are living apparitions that affect men more deeply than
fancied visits from the world of ghosts;—numbing respiration
momentarily, making the blood to gather about the heart like a great
weight, hushing the voice to a murmur, creating an indescribable
oppression in the throat—until nature seeks relief in a strong sigh
that fills the lungs with air again and cools for a brief moment the
sudden fever of the veins. The vision may endure but an instant—
seen under a gleam of sunshine, or through the antiquated gateway
one passes from time to time on his way to the serious part of the
city; yet that instant is enough to change the currents of the blood,
and slacken the reins of the will, and make us deaf and blind and
dumb for a time to the world of SOLID FACT. The whole being is
momentarily absorbed, enslaved by a vague and voiceless desire to
touch her, to kiss her, to bite her.

The lemon-gold blaze in the west faded out; the blue became
purple; and in the purple the mighty arch of stars burst into
illumination, with its myriad blossoms of fire white as a woman's
milk. A Spanish officer improved a momentary lull in the
conversation by touching a guitar, and all eyes turned toward the
musician, who suddenly wrung from his instrument the nervous,
passionate, semi-barbaric melody of a Spanish dance. For a moment
he played to an absolutely motionless audience; the very waving of
the fans ceased, the listeners held their breath. Then two figures
glided through the vine-framed doorway, and took their seats. One
was the Vision of a few hours before—a type of semi-tropical grace,
with the bloom of Southern youth upon her dark skin. The other
immediately impressed the stranger as the ugliest little Mexican
woman he had ever seen in the course of a long and experienced
life.
She was grotesque as a Chinese image of Buddha, no taller than a
child of ten, but very broadly built. Her skin had the ochre tint of
new copper; her forehead was large and disagreeably high; her nose
flat; her cheek-bones very broad and prominent; her eyes small,
deeply set, and gray as pearls; her mouth alone small, passionate,
and pouting, with rather thick lips, relieved the coarseness of her
face. Although so compactly built, she had no aspect of plumpness
or fleshiness:—she had the physical air of one of those little Mexican
fillies which are all nerve and sinew. Both women were in white; and
the dress of the little Mexican was short enough to expose a very
pretty foot and well-turned ankle.
Another beautiful woman would scarcely have diverted the stranger's
attention from the belle of the party that night; but that Mexican
was so infernally ugly, and so devilishly comical, that he could not
remove his eyes from her grotesque little face. He could not help
remarking that her smile was pleasing if not pretty, and her teeth
white as porcelain; that there was a strong, good-natured originality
about her face, and that her uncouthness was only apparent, as she
was the most accomplished dancer in the room. Even the belle's
movements seemed heavy compared with hers; she appeared to
dance as lightly as the hummingbird moves from blossom to
blossom. By and by he found to his astonishment that this strange
creature could fascinate without beauty and grace, and play
coquette without art; also that her voice had pretty bird tones in it;
likewise that the Spanish captain was very much interested in her,
and determined to monopolize her as much as possible for the rest
of the evening. And the stranger felt oddly annoyed thereat; and
sought to console himself by the reflection that she was the most
fantastically ugly little creature he had seen in his whole life. But for
some mysterious reason consolation refused to come. "Well, I am
going back to Honduras to-morrow," he thought—"and there
thoughts of women will give me very little concern."

"I protest against this kissing," cried the roguish host in a loud voice,
evidently referring to something that had just taken place in the
embrasure of the farther window. "On fait venir l'eau dans la
bouche! Monopoly is strictly prohibited. Our rights and feelings must
be taken into just consideration." Frenzied applause followed. What
difference did it make?—they were the world's Bohemians—here to-
day, there to-morrow!—before another moonrise they would be
scattered west and south;—the ladies ought to kiss them all for good
luck.

So the kiss of farewell was given under the great gate, overhung by
vine-tendrils drooping like a woman's hair love-loosened.

The beauty's lips shrank from the pressure of the stranger's;—it was
a fruitless phantom sort of kiss. "Y yo, señor," cried the little
Mexican, standing on tiptoe as she threw her arms about his neck.
Everybody laughed except the recipient of the embrace. He had
received an electric shock of passion which left him voiceless and
speechless, and—it seemed to him that his heart had ceased to
beat.
Those carmine-edged lips seemed to have a special life of their own
as of the gymnotus—as if crimsoned by something more lava-warm
than young veins: they pressed upon his mouth with the motion of
something that at once bites and sucks blood irresistibly but softly,
like the great bats which absorb the life of sleepers in tropical
forests;—there was something moist and cool and supple
indescribable in their clinging touch, as of beautiful snaky things
which, however firmly clasped, slip through the hand with boneless
strength;—they could not themselves be kissed because they
mesmerized and mastered the mouth presented to them;—their
touch for the instant paralyzed the blood, but only to fill its
motionless currents with unquenchable fires as strange as of a
tropical volcano, so that the heart strove to rise from its bed to meet
them, and all the life of the man seemed to have risen to his throat
only to strangle there in its effort at self-release. A feeble
description, indeed; but how can such a kiss be described?
.........
Six months later the stranger came back from Honduras, and
deposited some small but heavy bags in the care of his old host.
Then he called the old man aside, and talked long and earnestly and
passionately, like one who makes a confession.
The landlord burst into a good-natured laugh, "Ah la drôle!—la
vilaine petite drôle! So she made you crazy also. Mon cher, you are
not the only one, pardieu! But the idea of returning here on account
of one kiss, and then to be too late, after all! She is gone, my friend,
gone. God knows where. Such women are birds of passage. You
might seek the whole world and never find her; again, you might
meet her when least expected. But you are too late. She married the
guitarrista."

THE BIRD AND THE GIRL[26]

Suddenly, from the heart of the magnolia, came a ripple of liquid

notes, a delirium of melody, wilder than the passion of the
nightingale, more intoxicating than the sweetness of the night—the
mocking-bird calling to its mate.
"Ah, comme c'est coquet!—comme c'est doux!"—murmured the girl
who stood by the gateway of the perfumed garden, holding up her
mouth to be kissed with the simple confidence of a child.
"Not so sweet to me as your voice," he murmured, with lips close to
her lips, and eyes looking into the liquid jet that shone through the
silk of her black lashes.
The little Creole laughed a gentle little laugh of pleasure. "Have you
birds like that in the West?" she asked.
"In cages," he said. "But very few. I have seen five hundred dollars
paid for a fine singer. I wish you were a little mocking-bird!"
"Why?"
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