X.
A DIM morning and chill;—blank sky and sunless waters: the
sombre heaven of the North with colorless horizon rounding in a
blind grey sea. … What a sudden weight comes to the heart with
the touch of the cold mist, with the spectral melancholy of the
dawn;—and then what foolish though irrepressible yearning for
the vanished azure left behind!
… The little monkeys twitter plaintively, trembling in the
chilly air. The parrots have nothing to say: they look benumbed,
and sit on their perches with eyes closed.
… A vagueness begins to shape itself along the verge of the
sea, far to port: that long heavy clouding which indicates the
approach of land. And from it now floats to us something ghostly
and frigid which makes the light filmy and the sea shadowy as a
flood of dreams,—the fog of the Jersey coast.
At once the engines slacken their respiration. The Guadeloupe
begins to utter her steam-cry of warning,—regularly at
intervals of two minutes,—for she is now in the track of all the
ocean vessels. And from far away we can hear a heavy knelling,—
the booming of some great fog-bell.
… All in a white twilight. The place of the horizon has
vanished;—we seem ringed in by a wall of smoke. … Out of this
vapory emptiness—very suddenly—an enormous
steamer rushes,
towering like a hill—passes so close that we can see faces, and
disappears again, leaving the sea heaving and frothing behind
her.
… As I lean over the rail to watch the swirling of the wake, I
feel something pulling at my sleeve: a hand,—a tiny black hand,
—the hand of a sakiwinki. One of the little monkeys, straining to
the full length of his string, is making this dumb appeal for
human sympathy;—the bird-black eyes of both are fixed upon me
with the oddest look of pleading. Poor little tropical exiles!
I stoop to caress them; but regret the impulse a moment later:
they utter such beseeching cries when I find myself obliged to
leave them again alone! …
… Hour after hour the Guadeloupe glides on through the white
gloom,—cautiously, as if feeling her way; always sounding her
whistle, ringing her bells, until at last some brown-winged bark
comes flitting to us out of the mist, bearing a pilot. … How
strange it must all seem to Mademoiselle who stands so silent
there at the rail!—how weird this veiled world must appear to
her, after the sapphire light of her own West Indian sky, and the
great lazulite splendor of her own tropic sea!
But a wind comes;—it strengthens,—begins to blow very cold.
The mists thin before its blowing; and the wan blank sky is all
revealed again with livid horizon around the heaving of the iron-grey sea.
… Thou dim and lofty heaven of the North,—grey sky of Odin,
—bitter thy winds and spectral all thy colors!—they that dwell
beneath thee know not the glory of Eternal Summer's green,—the
azure splendor of southern day!—but thine are the lightnings of
Thought illuminating for human eyes the interspaces between sun
and sun. Thine the generations of might,—the strivers, the
battlers,—the men who make Nature tame!—
thine the domain of
inspiration and achievement,—the larger heroisms, the vaster
labors that endure, the higher knowledge, and all the witchcrafts
of science! …
But in each one of us there lives a mysterious Something which
is Self, yet also infinitely more than Self,—incomprehensibly
multiple,—the complex total of sensations, impulses, timidities
belonging to the unknown past. And the lips of the little
stranger from the tropics have become all white, because that
Something within her,—ghostly bequest from generations who
loved the light and rest and wondrous color of a more radiant
world,—now shrinks all back about her girl's heart with fear of
this pale grim North. … And lo!—opening mile-wide in dream-grey
majesty before us,—reaching away, through measureless mazes
of masting, into remotenesses all vapor-veiled,—the mighty
perspective of New York harbor! …
Thou knowest it not, this gloom about us, little maiden;—'tis
only a magical dusk we are entering,—only that mystic dimness in
which miracles must be wrought! … See the marvellous shapes
uprising,—the immensities, the astonishments! And other greater
wonders thou wilt behold in a little while, when we shall have
become lost to each other forever in the surging of the City's
million-hearted life! … 'Tis all shadow here, thou sayest?—
Ay, 'tis twilight, verily, by contrast with that glory out of
which thou camest, Lys—twilight only,—but the Twilight of the
Gods! … Adié, chè!—Bon-Dié ké
bént ou! …
