The Story of a Child Part 3

Her room, where I liked to come to play because it was so large and sunny, was furnished as simply as a Presbyterian parsonage: the waxed walnut furniture was of the Directory period, the large bed had a canopy of thick, red, cotton stuff and the walls were painted an ochre yellow; and upon them in gilt frames, slightly tarnished, were hung water colors representing vases of flowers. I very soon discovered that this room was furnished in a very simple and old-fas.h.i.+oned way, and I thought to myself that the good old grandmother who sang so constantly must be much poorer than my other grandmother, who was younger by twenty years, and who always dressed in black--which last matter seemed an elegant distinction to me.

But to return to my drawings! I think that the pictures of those two ducks, occupying such different stations in life, were the first I ever drew.

At the bottom of the picture called "The Happy Duck" I had drawn a tiny house, and near the duck himself there was a large, kind woman who was calling him to her so that she might give him food.

"The Unhappy Duck," on the other hand, was swimming about solitary and alone on a sort of hazy sea, which I had represented by drawing two or three straight lines, and in the distance one could see the outline of a gloomy sh.o.r.e. The thin paper, a leaf torn from a book, had print on the reverse side, and the letters showed through in grayish flecks and gave the curious impression as of clouds in the sky. And that little drawing, with less form than a school-boy's blackboard scrawl, was completely transfigured by those gray spots, and because of them it took on for me a deep and dreadful significance. Aided by the dim light in the room the pictured scene became a vision that faded away into the distance like the pale surface of the sea. I was terrified at my own work; I was astonished to find in it those things that I had not put there; to discover in it those things which elsewhere had given me such a well remembered anguish.

"Oh!" I said with exaltation to my young companion, who did not understand anything of what was going forward, "Oh!" I exclaimed with a voice full of emotion, "you may see it; I cannot bear to look at it!" I covered the picture with my hands, but nevertheless I peeped at it very often; and it was so vividly impressed upon my mind that I can still recall it as it appeared to me transfigured: a gleam of light lay upon the horizon of that sea so awkwardly represented, the heavens appeared to be filled with rain, and it seemed to be a dreary winter evening in which there was a fierce wind blowing.

The "Unhappy Duck" solitary, far away from his family and friends was making his way toward the foggy sh.o.r.e over which there hung an air of extreme sadness and desolation. And certainly for one fleeting moment I had a prescience of those heartaches that I was to know later in the course of my sailor life. I seemed to have a presentiment of those stormy December evenings when my boat was to enter, to take shelter until the morning, one of those uninhabited bays upon the coast of Brittany; more particularly I had a prescience of those twilights of the Antarctic winter when, in about the lat.i.tude of Magellan, we were to go in search of protection towards those sterile sh.o.r.es that are as inhospitable and as absolutely deserted as the waters surrounding them.

The vision faded and I once more found myself in my grandmother's large room enveloped in the shadows of the evening. My grandmother was singing, and I was again a tiny being who had seen nothing of the large world, who had fears without knowing wherefore, and who did not even know the cause of the tears that he shed.

Since then I have often observed that the rudimentary scrawls made by children, and which as representations are incorrect and inadequate, impress them much more than do the able and correct drawing of adults.

For although theirs are incomplete they add to them a thousand things of their own seeing and imagining; and they add to them also the thousand things that grow in the deep subsoil of their consciousness--the things which no brush would be able to paint.

CHAPTER X.

Upon the second floor, above the room occupied by my poor old grandmother, who sang the Ma.r.s.eillaise so constantly, in that part of the house overlooking the yard and the gardens, lived my great-aunt Bertha.

From her windows, across the houses and the walls covered with roses and jasmine, one could see the ramparts of the town. They were so near to us that their old trees were visible; and beyond them lay those great plains of our country called prees (prairies) all so alike, and as monotonous as the neighboring seas. From the window one also saw the river. At full tide, when it almost overflowed its banks, it looked, as it wound along through the green meadows, like silver lace; and the large and small boats that pa.s.sed in the far distance mounted upon this silver thread toward the harbor and from there sailed out into the great sea.

As this was our only glimpse of real country the windows in my aunt Bertha's room had always a great attraction for me. Especially had they in the evening at sunset, for from them I could watch the sun sink mysteriously behind the prairies. Oh! those sunsets that I saw from my aunt Bertha's windows, what ecstasy overcast with melancholy they awakened in me! The winter sunsets seen through the closed windows were a pale rose color. Those of summer time, upon stormy evenings, after a hot, bright day, I contemplated from the open window, and as I did so I would breathe in the sweet odors given out by the jasmine blossoms growing on the wall: it seems to me that there are no such sunsets now as there were then. When the sunsets were notably splendid and unusual, if I was not in the room, aunt Bertha, who never missed one, would call out hastily: "Dearie! Dearie! Come quickly!" From any corner of the house I heard that call and understood it, and I went swift as a hurricane and mounted the stairs four steps at a time. I mounted the more rapidly because the stairway had already begun to fill with dread shadows; and in the turnings and corners I saw the imaginary forms of ghosts and monsters that at nightfall always pursued me as I ran up the stairs.

My aunt Bertha's room, with its simple white muslin curtains, was as modest as my grandmother's. The walls, covered with an old-fas.h.i.+oned paper in vogue at the commencement of the century, were ornamented with water colors similar to those in my grandmother's room. The picture that I looked at most often was a pastel after Raphael of a virgin in white, blue and rose color. The rays of the setting sun always fell upon this picture (I have already said the hour of sunset was the time I preferred most to be in this room). This virgin was very much like my aunt Bertha; in spite of the great difference in their ages, one was struck with the resemblance between the straight lines and regularity of their profiles.

On this same floor, but upon the street side, lived my other grandmother (the one who always dressed in black) and her daughter, my aunt Claire, the person in the house who petted me most.

Upon winter evenings, after I had been to my aunt Bertha's room to see the sunset, it was my custom to go to them. I usually found them together in my grandmother's room and I would seat myself near the fire in a little chair placed there for me. But the twilight hour spent with them was always a disturbing one. . . . After all the amus.e.m.e.nts, all the day's running and playing, to sit in the dusk almost motionless upon my tiny chair, with eyes wide open, uneasily watching for the least change in the shadows, especially on that side of the room where the door opened on the dim stairway, was very painful to me. . . . I am sure that if my grandmother and aunt had known of the melancholy and terrors which the twilight induced in me, they would have spared me by lighting the lamp, but they did not know my sufferings; and it was the custom of the aged persons by whom I was surrounded, to sit tranquilly at nightfall in their accustomed places without having need for a lighted lamp. As it grew darker one or the other, grandmother or aunt, would draw her chair closer to me, and when I had that protection about me I felt completely happy and rea.s.sured and would say: "Please tell me stories about the Island."

The Island, that is the Island of Oleron, was my mother's native place, my grandmother's and aunt's also, which they had quitted twenty years before my birth to establish themselves upon the main land. The Island, or the least thing that came from it, had a singular charm for me.

It was quite near us, for from a garret window at the top of the house we could, upon a very clear day, see the extreme end of its extensive plain; it appeared a little bluish line against a still paler one which was the arm of the ocean separating us from it. . . . To get to it we had to take a long journey in wretched country wagons and in sailing boats; and often our boat had to make its way there in the teeth of a strong gale. At this time in the village of St. Pierre Oleron I had three old aunts who lived very modestly upon the revenues of their salt marshes (the remains of a once great inheritance), and their annual rents which the peasants still paid with sacks of wheat. . . . When I went to visit them at St. Pierre there was for me a certain joy, mingled with many kinds of conflicting emotions, which I cannot explain, in trying to picture to myself their once great station.

The Huguenot austerity of their manners, their mode of life, their house and their furniture all belonged to a past time, to a bygone generation.

The sea surrounded and isolated us, and the wind constantly swept over the moorland and over the great stretches of sandy beach.

My nurse was also from the Island, of a Huguenot family, which descending from father to son had been with us for a long time; and she would say: "At home, on the Island," in such a way that with a wave of emotion I understood her great homesickness for it.

We had about us a number of little articles that had come from there, and which had places of honor in our home. We had some black pebbles large as cannon-b.a.l.l.s, that had been chosen from the thousands lying on the Long-Beach because centuries of was.h.i.+ng had polished and rounded them exquisitely. These pebbles always played an important part every winter evening, for with the greatest regularity the old people would put them into the chimney-place where a wood fire blazed and crackled; afterwards they slipped them into calico bags of a flowered pattern, also brought from the Island, and took them to bed where they served to keep their feet warm during the night.

In our cellar we had wooden props and firkins, and also a number of straight elm poles for holding the was.h.i.+ng which had been cut from the choicest young trees in my grandmother's forest. I had the greatest veneration for all these things. I knew that my grandmother no longer owned the forests, nor the salt marshes, nor the vineyards; for I had heard them say that she had sold them one at a time to put the money into investments upon the mainland; and that an incompetent notary by his bad investments had greatly reduced her income.

When I went to the Island and the old salt makers and vine dressers, who had at one time worked for our family, still loyal and respectful called me "our little master," I knew they did so out of pure politeness and altogether in deference to our past grandeur.

I regretted that I could not spend my life in tending the vineyards and the harvests, the occupations of several of my ancestors. Such a life seemed a much more desirable one to me than my own which was pa.s.sed in a house in town.

The stories of the Island that my grandmother and aunt Claire related to me were generally of the happenings of their own childhood, a childhood that seemed so very far away that to me it had no more reality than a dream.

There were stories of grandfathers, long dead; of great-uncles whom I had never known, dead also for many years. When my aunt told me their names and described them to me I would abandon myself to reverie. There was in particular a grandfather Samuel who had preached at the time of the religious persecution, whom I thought an extraordinarily interesting person.

I did not care whether the stories were different or not, and I would ask for the same ones over and over. Often they told me stories of journeys they had taken on the little donkeys that played such an important part in the lives of the people of St. Pierre. They would ride upon them to visit distant properties and vineyards; to get to these it was often necessary to travel along the sands of the Long-Beach, and sometimes of an evening during these expeditions terrible storms would burst upon the travellers and compel them to take shelter for the night in the inns and farmhouses.

And as I sat in the darkness that no longer had terrors for me, my imagination busy with the things and peoples of other days, tinkle, tinkle would go the dinner bell; then I rose and jumped for joy, and we would go down to the dining-room together and find all the family gathered there in the bright gay room: then I would run to my mother and in an excess of emotion hide my face in her dress.

CHAPTER XI.

Gaspard was a little crop-eared dog who was saved from absolute homeliness by the vivacious and kindly expression of his eyes. I do not now recall how he came to domesticate himself with us, but I do know that I loved him very tenderly.

One winter afternoon, when he and I were out for a walk, he ran away from me. I consoled myself, however, by saying that he would certainly return to the house alone, and I went home in a happy frame of mind. But when night came and he was still absent I grew very heavy of heart.

My parents had at dinner that evening an accomplished violinist and they had given me permission to remain up later than usual so that I might hear him. The first sweep of his bow which preluded I know not what slow and desolate movement, sounded to me like an invocation to those dark woodland paths in which, in the deeps of night, one feels that he is lost and abandoned; as the musician played I had a vision of Gaspard mistaking his way at the cross-roads because of the rain, and I saw him take an unfamiliar path that led forever away from friends and home.

Then my tears began to flow, but no one perceived them; and as I wept the violin continued to fill the silence with its sad wailing, and it seemed to get a response from bottomless abysses inhabited by phantoms to which I could give neither a form nor name.

That was my introduction to reverie awaking music, and years pa.s.sed before I again experienced such sensations, for the little piano pieces that I began to play for myself soon after this (in a remarkable way for a child of my age they said) sounded to me only like sweet, rhythmical noise.

CHAPTER XII.

I wish now to speak of the anguish caused by a story that was read to me. (I seldom read for myself, and in fact I disliked books very much.)

A very disobedient little boy who had run away from his family and his native land, years later, after the death of his parents and his sister, returned alone to visit his parental home. This took place in November, and naturally the author described the dull gray sky and spoke of the bleak wind that blew the few remaining leaves from the trees.

In a deserted garden, in an arbor stripped of all its green, the prodigal son in stooping down found among the autumn leaves a bluish bead that had lain there since the time he had played in the bower with his sister.

Oh! at that point I begged them to cease reading, for I felt the sobs coming. I could see, see vividly, that solitary garden, that leafless old arbor, and half-hidden under the reddish leaves I saw that blue bead, souvenir of the dead sister. . . . It depressed me dreadfully and gave me a conception of that inevitable fading away of everything and every one, of the great universal change that comes to all.

It is strange that my tenderly guarded infancy should have been so full of sad emotions and morbid reflections.

I am sure that the sad days and happenings were rare, and that I lived the joyous and careless life of other children; but just because the happy days were so habitual to me they made no impression upon my mind, and I can no longer recall them.

My memories of the summer time are so similar that they break with the splendor of the sun into the dark places and things of my mind.

And always the great heat, the deep blue skies, the sparkling sand of the beach and the flood of light upon the white lime walls of the cottages of the little villages upon the "Island" induced in me a melancholy and sleepiness which I afterwards experienced with even greater intensity in the land of the Turk.