lows! they wrestle like veritable ephebi. Her children would be beautiful and vigorous like these. The Basques are Catholics. That is why she has a saint's name, a commonplace name. Marie is melodious; but I should have liked to hear a name more ancient, more pagan,-a primitive name whereof the meaning is forgotten, and the etymology undiscoverable, a name transmitted from generation to generation through two hundred thousand years. VIII Poor little dead birds!—moisture of pain oozing from the tiny lids that will never open to view the sun again,-blood spattering the downy breast, the dainty wing! Destroyed in the fraction of a moment, that beauty slowly formed through years as numerous as the stars of heaven! . . . Marie's brother, -the one with great gray eyes like her own,-has killed them. I buy them from him only because he is her brother; and I' wish to be agreeable to him. He strides away with his oldfashioned shotgun,—promising to kill more; and I do not even attempt to dissuade him from such useless slaughter. Moral cowardice, perhaps. And all the long way home, great flies, metallically green, circle with keen whizzings about the dead birds, furious to begin their part in the work of dissolution. IX "Spirit and wind,—ghost and breath," the father tells me, are the same in the ancient tongue of Scripture; and the dead language seems to live again on his lips as he recalls his collegiate studies, to repeat the original text:-"Darkness was upon the face of the great deep; and the Spirit of God moved over the waters" . . . It is a wild day;—under a northeast wind the waves take a deep and sinister tint of green. And looking out upon the immensity of waters and winds,—the Visible ... shifting its colors, moving with multiple thunders in obedience to the voluminous Invisible,—the antique words come to me with new and awful expansion of meaning, with unutterable sublimity and vastness. Such men as he may readily cast off the constraints of city life, may easily forsake its monotonous pleasures, may boldly free themselves from its pains;-they may find splendor in waste places; desolation to them makes visible the eternal, because they feel the Infinite. And I, too, love the inspiring calm of great solitudes,—the pure rude joy of living close to nature, -delight of keen sea-winds,-glories of sunrise and sunset, the thunder-song of long waves,—the light of living waters. If one could but live here always,-in this great blue light,—in this immaculate air. But ... X "Maiteya," sweetheart; ene maiteya, "my beloved": these are the only words of the Basque tongue which I know,— which I shall always know, because her own lips first taught me to pronounce them. The wind lifts her long loose hair across my face,-as inviting me to inhale its perfume. Exquisite and indescribable perfume of youth! what flower-ghost prisoned in crystal owneth so delicate a magic as thou? Unnumbered the songs which celebrate the breath of blossoms, the scent of gardens,-yet what blossom-soul, what flower-witchery might charm the sense like the odor of a woman's hair, the natural perfume of beauty, the fresh and delicious fragrance of youth? ... Only the great slow slopping of the sea under the stars, —to break a hush like the silence of Revelations. Something that Nature wishes to say swells at my heart,-flames in my veins, struggles at my lips,-tugs fiercely at the slender, straining tether of Will that holds it back. Yet she seems to wait . . . even the stars seem to wait, and the waves, and the winds that play with her hair! And tomorrow will be too late. But I may never say it! XI And this was my dream: I stood upon a low land washed by a vast sea, whose waters had no voice; and the light was gray, for the sun was a phantom sun that only made a gloaming; and I also seemed to be a phantom. And Marie was there, seated upon the drifted trunk of some mighty tree; and I strove to speak to her, but found myself also voiceless like that spectral surge. Then I would have kissed her, but that a Shape—a woman's Shape, came between, all suddenly and noiselessly, I knew not from whence. And the face was the face of one long dead, yet I knew that face!—the eyes were hollows of darkness only, yet I knew those eyes!the smile was the smile of that sphinx whose secrets are never betrayed, whose mysteries are never revealed-the smile that seems an eternal mockery of love and hate, of hope and despair, of faith and doubt,-the universal smile death wears when the mask of the flesh hath fallen ... and yet I knew the smile! And I looked at the bones of the face that smiled; and I felt the bones of the thin dead hands drawing me, dragging me away from the dim light, into vast and moonless darkness beyond,-so that I feared with unutterable fear, and strove to call the name of Marie, and strove in vain. And Marie seemed to know it not;her great gray eyes, steadily gazing over that shadowy sea, seemed as the eyes of one who knoweth neither hate nor pity... XII ... Still I can see her beauty outlined against the great disk of gold-"a Woman standing in the sun," as she watches our white ship receding, diminishing, melting into the West. Even so will I behold her again in dream, haloed with the glory of morning, framed in the light of sunrise,—many, many times; and memory will waft to me again the perfume of her hair, and slumber will vouchsafe to me shadowy caress of lips that I may never kiss, the charm of eyes whose gaze will never again meet mine. . . . Now vanished the many-angled roofs, the thin bright edge of green, all the long island line with its white fringe of surges!—there is only sky and sea and the sun that may kiss that golden throat of hers, the dear sun that revealed to me her beauty, the sun that shines upon us both even at this moment,-that will illumine each of us when seas shall roll between,-that will pour his gold upon our graves when all our pains and hopes and loves and memories shall have become as though they had never been. . . O blessed blue light! O pure sweet air! O living winds and leaping waters, how dear ye are, how divine ye seem at parting! Were it even possible to forget. . . But there will be long, long nights, when I must hear a voice of ghostly winds, and see the shimmering of fancied waters, and follow in vision the curves of a smooth low shore to meet One standing in the light of dreams, against that weird sun that giveth no warmth, that casteth no shadow;-and I must awake to find about me darkness and silence only,—to wrestle with mocking and invincible memories, to be vanquished by regrets as irrepressible, as hopeless, as tears for the dead, as prayer for pardon at a tomb.. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894) ÆS TRIPLEX1 THE changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night. Again, in taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence a whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind, from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule trees of mediæval Europe. The poorest persons have a bit of pageant going toward the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door. All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid 1 Reprinted with the kind permission of Charles Scribner's Sons. |