Fantastics and other Fancies/MDCCCLIII
MDCCCLIII[1]
Somebody I knew was there,—a woman. . . . Heat, motionless and ponderous, as in some feverish colonial city rising from the venomous swamps of the Ivory Coast. The sky-blue seemed to bleach from the horizon's furnace edges,—even sounds were muffled and blunted by the heaviness of that air,—vaguely, as to a dozing brain, came the passing reverberation of footsteps;—the river-current was noiseless and thick and lazy, like wax-made fluid. . . . Such were the days,—and each day offered up a triple hecatomb to death,—and the faces of all the dead were yellow as flame. . . .
Never a drop of rain:—the thin clouds which made themselves visible of evenings only, flocking about the dying fires of the west, seemed to dwellers in the city troops of ghosts departing with the day, as in the fantastic myths of the South Pacific.
. . . I passed the outer iron gate,—the warm sea-shells strewing the way broke under my feet with faint saline odors in the hot air:
— I heard the iron tongue of a bell utter one, with the sinister vibration of a knell,—signaling the eternal extinction of a life. Seven and seventy times that iron tongue had uttered its grim monosyllable since the last setting of the sun. The grizzled watcher of the inner gate extended his pallid palm for that eleemosynary contribution exacted from all visitors;—and it seemed to me that I beheld the gray Ferryman of Shadows himself, silently awaiting his obolus from me, also a Shadow. And as I glided into the world of agony beyond, the dead-bell moved its iron tongue again—once. . . .
Vast bare gleaming corridors into which many doors exhaled odors of medicines and moans and sound of light footsteps hurrying—then I stood a moment all alone—a long moment that I repass sometimes in dreams. (Only that in dreams of the past there are no sounds—the dead are dumb; and the fondest, may not retain the evanescent memory of a voice.) Then suddenly approached a swift step—so light, so light that it seemed the coming of a ghost; and I saw a slight figure black-robed from neck to feet, the fantastically winged cap of a Sister, and beneath the white cap a dark and beautiful face with very black eyes. Even then the iron bell spake again—once! I muttered—nay, I whispered, all fearful with the fearfulness of that place, the name of a ward and—the name of a Woman.
"Friend, friend! what do you want here?" murmured the Sister, who saw that the visitor was a stranger. Hers was the first voice I had heard in that place of death, and it seemed so sweet and clear,—a musical vibration of youth and hope! And I answered, this time audibly. "You are not afraid?" she asked.—"Come!"
Taking my hand, she led me thither—through spaces of sunlight and shadow, through broad and narrow ways, and between rows of beds white like rows of tombs. Her hand was cool and light as mist,—as frost,—as the guiding touch of that spirit might be whom the faithful of many creeds believe to lead their dead out of the darkness, into some vast new dawning beyond. . . . "You are not afraid?—not afraid?" the sweet voice asked again. And I suddenly became aware of the dead, lying between us, and the death-color in her face, like a flare of sunset. . . .
Then for an instant everything became dark between me and the Sister standing upon the other side of the dead—and I was groping in that darkness blindly, until I felt a cool hand grasp mine, leading me silently somewhere—somewhere into the light. "Come! you have no claim here, friend! you cannot take her back from God!—let us leave her with Him!" And I obeyed all voicelessly. I felt her light, cool hand leading me again between the long ranks of white beds, and through the vast, bare corridors, and the shining lobbies, and by the doors of a hundred chambers of death.
Then at the summit of the great stairway, she turned her rich gaze into my eyes with a strange, sweet, silent sympathy, pressed my hand an instant, and was gone. I heard the whisper of her departing robe; I saw the noise- less fluttering of her white cap;—a great door opened very silently, closed inaudibly; and I was all alone.—(Some one told me, only a few days later, that the iron bell had also spoken for her, the little Sister of Charity,—in the middle of the night,—once!)
And I, standing alone upon the stairs, felt something unutterably strange within me—the influence of that last look, perhaps still vibrating, like an expiring sunbeam, a dying tone. Something in her eyes had rekindled into life something long burned out within my heart—the ashes of a Faith entombed as in a sepulchral um. . . . Yet only a moment; and the phantom flame sank back into its ashes; and I was in the sunlight again, iron of purpose as Pharaoh after the death of his first-born. It was only a dead emotion, warmed to resurrection by the sunshine of a woman's eyes.
. . . Nevertheless, I fancy that when the Ringer is preparing to ring for me,—and the great darkness deepens all about me,—when sounds sink to their whispers and questions must remain eternally unanswered,—when memory is fading out into the infinite blackness, and those strange dreams that precurse the final dissolution marshal their illusions before me,—I fancy that I might hear again the whisper of a black robe, and feel a hand, light as frost, held out to me with the sweet questioning—"Come! You are not afraid?"
- ↑ Times-Democrat, May 21, 1882. Hearn's own title.