The Crocodile

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The Crocodile
by Gouverneur Morris
1905

The first locality of which I have any recollection was my father's library a tall, melancholy room devoted to books and illusions. Three sides were of books, somberly bound, reaching from the floor to within three feet of the ceiling. Along the shelf, which was erroneously supposed to protect the tops of the top row of books from the dust with which our house abounded, were stationed, at precise intervals, busts done in plaster after the antique and death masks. Beginning on the left was the fury-haunted face of Orestes; next to him the lachrymose features of Niobe; following her Medusa, crowned with serpents The rest were death masks -- Napoleon, Washington, Voltaire, and my father's father. The prevailing dust, settled thick upon the heads of these grim images, lent them the venerable illusion of gray hair. The three walls of books were each pierced by a long, narrow window, for the room was an extension from the main block of the house, but over two of these the shutters were opaquely closed in winter and summer. The third window, however, was allowed to extend whatever beneficence of light it could to the dismal and musty interior. A person of sharp sight, sitting at the black oak table in the middle of the room, might, on a fine day, have seen clearly enough to write on very white paper with very black ink, or to read out of a large-typed book. Through the fourth wall a door, nearly always closed, led into the main hall, which, like the library itself, was a tall and melancholy place of twilight and illusions. When my poor mother died, in giving me birth, she was laid out in the library and buried from the hall. Consequently, according to old-fashioned custom, these apartments were held sacred to her memory rather than other portions of the house in which she had enjoyed the more fortunate phases of life and happiness. The room in which my mother had actually died was never entered by any one save my father. Its door was double locked, like that of our family vault in the damp hollow among the sycamores.
The first thing that I remember was that I had had a mother who had died and been buried. The second, that I had a father with a white face and black clothes and noiseless feet, whose duty in life was to shut doors, pull down window shades, and mourn for my mother. The third was a carved wooden box, situated in the exact center of the oak table in the library, which contained a scroll of stained paper covered with curious characters, and a small but miraculously preserved crocodile. I was never allowed to touch the scroll or the crocodile, but in his lenient moods, which were few and touched with heartrending melancholy, my father would set the box open upon a convenient chair and allow me to peer my heart out at its mysterious contents. The crocodile, my father sometimes told me, was an Egyptian charm which was supposed to bring misfortune upon its possessor. "But I let it stay on my table," he would say, "because in the first place I am without superstition, and in the second because I am far distant from the longest and wildest reach of misfortune. When I lost your mother I lost all. Ay! but 't she was bonny, my boy -- bonny!" It was very sad to hear him run on about the bonniness of my mother, and old Ann, my quondam nurse, has told me how at the funeral he stood for a long time by the casket, saying over and over, "Wasn't she bonny? Wasn't she bonny?" and followed her to the vault among the sycamores with the same iteration upon his lips.
It was not until I was near eight years old that my father could bear the sight of me, so much had we been divided by the innocent share which I had had in my mother's death. But I was not allowed to pass those eight years in ignorance of the results of my being, or of the constant mourning to which my father had devoted the balance of his days. I was brought up, so to speak, on my mother's death and burial. Another child might have been nurtured thus into a vivid contrast, but I ran fluidly into the mold sober, and came very near to solidifying. Death and its ancientry have a horrible fascination for children. And for me, wherever I turned, there was a plenitude of morbid suggestion. Indeed, our plantation -- held by the family from the earliest colonization of Georgia, spread along the low shore by mismanagement and partly by the nonsuccess of the rebellion, into a sad