Chita: A Memory of Last Island | Page 7

herds of the porpoises, or from the grande-ecaille,--that splendid monster whom no net may hold,--all helmed and armored in argent plate-mail?--or from the hideous devilfish of the Gulf,--gigantic, flat-bodied, black, with immense side-fins ever outspread like the pinions of a bat,--the terror of luggermen, the uprooter of anchors? From all these, perhaps, and from other monsters likewise--goblin shapes evolved by Nature as destroyers, as equilibrists, as counterchecks to that prodigious fecundity, which, unhindered, would thicken the deep into one measureless and waveless ferment of being... But when there are many bathers these perils are forgotten,--numbers give courage,--one can abandon one's self, without fear of the invisible, to the long, quivering, electrical caresses of the sea ...
V.
Thirty years ago, Last Island lay steeped in the enormous light of even such magical days. July was dying;--for weeks no fleck of cloud had broken the heaven's blue dream of eternity; winds held their breath; slow waveless caressed the bland brown beach with a sound as of kisses and whispers. To one who found himself alone, beyond the limits of the village and beyond the hearing of its voices,--the vast silence, the vast light, seemed full of weirdness. And these hushes, these transparencies, do not always inspire a causeless apprehension: they are omens sometimes--omens of coming tempest. Nature,--incomprehensible Sphinx!--before her mightiest bursts of rage, ever puts forth her divinest witchery, makes more manifest her awful beauty ...
But in that forgotten summer the witchery lasted many long days,--days born in rose-light, buried in gold. It was the height of the season. The long myrtle-shadowed village was thronged with its summer population;--the big hotel could hardly accommodate all its guests;--the bathing-houses were too few for the crowds who flocked to the water morning and evening. There were diversions for all,--hunting and fishing parties, yachting excursions, rides, music, games, promenades. Carriage wheels whirled flickering along the beach, seaming its smoothness noiselessly, as if muffled. Love wrote its dreams upon the sand ...
... Then one great noon, when the blue abyss of day seemed to yawn over the world more deeply than ever before, a sudden change touched the quicksilver smoothness of the waters--the swaying shadow of a vast motion. First the whole sea-circle appeared to rise up bodily at the sky; the horizon-curve lifted to a straight line; the line darkened and approached,--a monstrous wrinkle, an immeasurable fold of green water, moving swift as a cloud-shadow pursued by sunlight. But it had looked formidable only by startling contrast with the previous placidity of the open: it was scarcely two feet high;--it curled slowly as it neared the beach, and combed itself out in sheets of woolly foam with a low, rich roll of whispered thunder. Swift in pursuit another followed--a third--a feebler fourth; then the sea only swayed a little, and stilled again. Minutes passed, and the immeasurable heaving recommenced--one, two, three, four ... seven long swells this time;--and the Gulf smoothed itself once more. Irregularly the phenomenon continued to repeat itself, each time with heavier billowing and briefer intervals of quiet--until at last the whole sea grew restless and shifted color and flickered green;--the swells became shorter and changed form. Then from horizon to shore ran one uninterrupted heaving--one vast green swarming of snaky shapes, rolling in to hiss and flatten upon the sand. Yet no single cirrus-speck revealed itself through all the violet heights: there was no wind!--you might have fancied the sea had been upheaved from beneath ...
And indeed the fancy of a seismic origin for a windless surge would not appear in these latitudes to be utterly without foundation. On the fairest days a southeast breeze may bear you an odor singular enough to startle you from sleep,--a strong, sharp smell as of fish-oil; and gazing at the sea you might be still more startled at the sudden apparition of great oleaginous patches spreading over the water, sheeting over the swells. That is, if you had never heard of the mysterious submarine oil-wells, the volcanic fountains, unexplored, that well up with the eternal pulsing of the Gulf-Stream ...
But the pleasure-seekers of Last Island knew there must have been a "great blow" somewhere that day. Still the sea swelled; and a splendid surf made the evening bath delightful. Then, just at sundown, a beautiful cloud-bridge grew up and arched the sky with a single span of cottony pink vapor, that changed and deepened color with the dying of the iridescent day. And the cloud-bridge approached, stretched, strained, and swung round at last to make way for the coming of the gale,--even as the light bridges that traverse the dreamy Teche swing open when luggermen sound through their conch-shells the long, bellowing signal of approach.
Then the wind began to blow, with the passing of July. It blew from the northeast, clear, cool. It blew in