Chita: A Memory of Last Island Read online

... Night after night,through many a month of pain. Then for a time the gentle presenceceased to haunt her,--seemed to have lain down to sleep forever underthe high bright grass and yellow flowers. Why did it return, thatnight of all nights, to kiss her, to cling to her, to nestle in herarms?

  For in her dream she thought herself still kneeling before the waxenImage, while the terrors of the tempest were ever deepening abouther,--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 Virginbecame tall as a woman, and taller,--rising to the roof and smiling asshe grew. Then Carmen would have cried out for fear, but thatsomething smothered her voice,--paralyzed her tongue. And the Virginsilently stooped above her, and placed in her arms the Child,--thebrown Child with the Indian face. And the Child whitened in her handsand changed,--seeming as it changed to send a sharp pain through herheart: an old pain linked somehow with memories of bright windySpanish hills, and summer scent of olive groves, and all the luminousPast;--it looked into her face with the soft dark gaze, with theunforgotten smile of ... dead Conchita!

  And Carmen wished to thank; the smiling Virgin for that pricelessbliss, and lifted up her eyes, but the sickness of ghostly fearreturned upon her when she looked; for now the Mother seemed as a womanlong dead, and the smile was the smile of fleshlessness, and the placesof the eyes were voids and darknesses ... And the sea sent up so vast aroar that the dwelling rocked.

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

  III.

  Rain and a blind sky and a bursting sea Feliu and his men, Miguel andMateo, looked out upon the thundering and flashing of the monstroustide. The wind had fallen, and the gray air was full of gulls. Behindthe cheniere, back to the cloudy line of low woods many miles away,stretched a wash of lead-colored water, with a green point piercing ithere and there--elbow-bushes or wild cane tall enough to keep theirheads above the flood. But the inundation was visiblydecreasing;--with the passing of each hour more and more green patchesand points had been showing themselves: by degrees the course of thebayou had become defined--two parallel winding lines of dwarf-timberand bushy shrubs traversing the water toward the distantcypress-swamps. Before the cheniere all the shell-beach slope was piledwith wreck--uptorn trees with the foliage still fresh upon them,splintered timbers of mysterious origin, and logs in multitude, scarredwith gashes of the axe. Feliu and his comrades had saved wood enoughto build a little town,--working up to their waists in the surf, withropes, poles, and boat-hooks. The whole sea was full of flotsam. Votoa Cristo!--what a wrecking there must have been! And to think theCarmencita could not be taken out!

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

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

  But, as they worked on, they began to see stranger things,--white deadfaces and dead hands, which did not look like the hands or the faces ofdrowned sailors: the ebb was beginning to run strongly, and these werepassing out with it on the other side of the mouth of thebayou;--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;--theirpracticed eyes began to search the courses of the sea-currents,--keenas the gaze of birds that watch the wake of the plough. And soon thecasks and the drift were forgotten; for it seemed to them that the tidewas heavy with human dead--passing out, processionally, to the greatopen. Very far, where the huge pitching of the swells was diminished bydistance into a mere fluttering of ripples, the water appeared as ifsprinkled with them;--they vanished and became visible again atirregular intervals, here and there--floating most thicklyeastward!--tossing, swaying patches of white or pink or blue or blackeach with its tiny speck of flesh-color showing as the sea lifted orlowered the body. Nearer to shore there were few; but of these twowere close enough to be almost recognizable: Miguel first discernedthem. They were rising and falling where the water was deepest--wellout in front of the mouth of the bayou, beyond the flooded sand-bars,and moving toward the shell-reef westward. They were drifting almostside by side. One was that of a negro, apparently well attired, andwearing a white apron;--the other seemed to be a young colored girl,clad in a blue dress; she was floating upon her face; they couldobserve that she had nearly straight hair, braided and tied with a redribbon. These were evidently house-servants,--slaves. But fromwhence? Nothing could be learned until the luggers should return; andnone of them was yet in sight. Still Feliu was not anxious as to thefate of his boats, manned by the best sailors of the coast. Rarely arethese Louisiana fishermen lost in sudden storms; even when to othereyes the appearances are most pacific and the skies most splendidlyblue, they divine some far-off danger, like the gulls; and like thegulls also, you see their light vessels fleeing landward. These menseem living barometers, exquisitely sensitive to all the invisiblechanges of atmospheric expansion and compression; they are not easilycaught in those awful dead calms which suddenly paralyze the wings of abark, and hold her helpless in their charmed circle, as in a nightmare,until the blackness overtakes her, and the long-sleeping sea leaps upfoaming to devour her.

  --"Carajo!"

  The word all at once bursts from Feliu's mouth, with that peculiarguttural snarl of the "r" betokening strong excitement,--while hepoints to something rocking in the ebb, beyond the foaming of theshell-reef, under a circling of gulls. More dead? Yes--but somethingtoo that lives and moves, like a quivering speck of gold; and Mateoalso perceives it, a gleam of bright hair,--and Miguel likewise, aftera moment's gazing. A living child;--a lifeless mother. Pobrecita! Noboat within reach, and only a mighty surf-wrestler could hope to swimthither and return!

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

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

  A moment more, and Feliu has lifted himself beside the waifs ... Howfast the dead woman clings, as if with the one power which is strong asdeath,--the desperate force of love! Not in