Volume I Part 12 (1/2)
Yours a jamais, L HEARN
TO H E KREHBIEL
NEW ORLEANS, 1877
”O-ME-TAW-BOODH!”--Have I not indeed been much bewitched by thine exotic comedy, which hath the mild perfume and yellow beauty of a Chinese rose?
assuredly I have been enchanted by the Eastern fragrance of thy many-coloured brochure; for mine head ”is not as yellow as hten ard to the lish;” for I have been wearing out the iron shoes of patience in my vain endeavour to co the play, was that I ht have been able to hear the musical interludes,--the barbaric beauty of the melodies,--and the plaintive sadness of thy serpent-skinned instruments I shall soon return the MSS to thy hands
By the bye, did you ever hear a _real_ Chinese gong? I don't reat moon-disks of yellow entleor, North Wales, who had a private museum of South Pacific and Chinese curiosities, exhibited one toamidst Fiji spears beautifully barbed with shark's teeth, which, together with grotesque New Zealand clubs of green stone and Sandwich Island paddles wrought with the baroque visages of the Shark-God, were depending from the walls Also there were Indian elephants in ivory, carrying balls in their carven bellies, each ball containing li over a Southern swamp My friend tapped its ancient face with a muffled drumstick, and it coain, and it ain, and it corew deeper and deeper, till it see over an abyss in the Cordilleras, or the crashi+ng of Thor's chariot wheels It ful, and astonishi+ng as awful I assure you I did not laugh at it at all It i terrible and ht to understand how that thin, thin disk of trehtful a vibration He infor chiefly old
Let ive you a description of my new residence I never knehat the beauty of an old Creole ho more picturesque outside of Venice or Florence For six et a roos; but the rents seemed to me maliciously enormous However, I at last obtained one for 3 per week Yet it is on the third floor, rear building;--these old princes of the South built always double edifices, covering an enors, courtyards, and slave quarters
The building is on St Louis Street, a street several hundred years old
I enter by a huge archway about a hundred feet long,--full of rolling echoes, and coht moss At the end, the archway opens into a court There are a few graceful bananas here with their giant leaves splitting in ribbons in the su pales h the broad paved court in the old days The stables are here still; but the blooded horses are gone, and the fae, with its French coat of aron left to cru sleeps like a stone sphinx at a corner of the broad stairway; and I fancy that in his still slu of a Creole ard or Lee and never ca for hieneration, and I creep quietly by lest I e stairway At every landing a vista of broad archways reechoes my steps--archways that once led to rooms worthy of a prince But the rooms are now cold and cheerless and vast with e host of luxury and wealth seeer in theh an archway on the right, find myself on a broad piazza, at the end of which is h for a Carnival ball Five s and glass doors open flush with the floor and rise to the ceilings They open on two sides upon the piazza, whence I have a far view of tropical gardens and nificent The walls are tinted pale orange colour; green curtains drape the doors and s; and theoval mirror of Venetian pattern, is of white marble veined like the bosoe apartment rises a bed as massive as a fortress, with tre a curtained canopy at the height of sixteen feet It see, yet it does not There is no carpet on the floor, no pictures on the wall,--a sense of soentle melancholy;--the breezes play fantastically with the pallid curtains, and the breath of flowers ascends into the chaardens below Oh, the silence of this house, the perfu Frenchwoe the roohost and disappears too soon in the recesses of the awful house I would like to speak with her, for her lips drop honey, and her voice is richly sweet like the cooing of a dove ”O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret hiding-places of the stairs, let me see thy face, let me hear thy voice, for thy voice is sweet and thy countenance is comely!”
Let s, concerning a Ro shadow of steaish sails It has a hero greater, I think, than Bludso; but his name is lost At least it is lost in Southern history; yet perhaps it reat book whose leaves never turn yelloith Time, and whose letters are eternal as the stars But the reason his naer”
TO H E KREHBIEL
NEW ORLEANS, 1878
MY DEAR MUSICIAN,--I wrote you such a shabby, disjointed letter last week that I feel I ought to make up for it,--especially after your newsy, fresh, pleasant letter toof life, energy, success, and strong hopes
I am very much ashamed that I have not yet been able to keep all my proet copied by Saturday, and could not succeed in obtaining But it is only delayed, I assure you; and New Orleans is going to produce a treat for you soon
George Cable, a char writer, some of whose dainty New Orleans stories youa work containing a study of Creole iven, with the musical text in footnotes I have helped Cable a little in collecting the songs; but he has the advantage ofable to write music by ear Scribner will publish the volume This is not, of course, for publicity
My new journalistic lifein the North I have at last succeeded in getting right into the fantastic heart of the French quarter, where I hear the antiquated dialect all day long Early in the s, a cup of black coffee, a dish of creahtful cake of pressedin crea This is a heavy breakfast here, but costs only about twenty-five cents Then I slip down to the office, and rattle off a couple of leaders on literary or European raphic news This occupies about an hour Then the country papers,--half French, half English,--altogether barbarous, come in from all the wild, untamed parishes of Louisiana Madly I seize the scissors and the paste-pot and construct a column of crop-notes This occupies about half an hour Then the New York dailies make their appearance I devour their substance and take notes for the ensuing day's expression of opinion And then the work is over, and the long golden afternoon welcomes me forth to enjoy its perfuhtful existence for one without as On Sunday the brackish Lake Pontchartrain offers the attraction of a long swi in the Mississippi is dangerous on account of great fierce fish, the alligator-gars, which attack a swilish swimmer was bitten by one only the other day in the river, and, losing his presence of e and drowned
Folks here tellmore to fear, and will soon be accli a bundle of sharp bones and saddle-coloured parcherous here to drink et half a bottle of strong claret, and this youa leet,--you can only buy them when schooners come in from the Gulf islands But no one kno delicious lemonade can be made until he has tasted le study for an artist thisA friend accoht an enors for about fifteen cents We could not half finish the shadow of a eunuch banana-tree in the Square As I munched and munched a half-naked boy ran by,--a fellow that would have charmed Murillo, with a skin like a new cent in colour, and heavy masses of hair massed as tastefully as if sculptured in ebony I threw a fig at him and hit him in the back He ate it, and coolly walked toward us with his little bronze hands turned upward and opened to their fullest capacity, and a pair of great black eyes flashed a request for more You never saw such a pair of eyes,--deep and dark,--a night without a lish,--no answer; in French,--no response My friend bounced hi of that kind, but it was no good We asked hier rocking at the Picayune pier I filled his little brown hands with figs, but he did not slearatias, Senor” Why, that boy _was_ Murillo's boy after all, _propria persona_ He departed to the rakish lugger, and we dreaipsies under the emasculated banana
L HEARN
TO H E KREHBIEL
NEW ORLEANS, 1878
MY DEAR KREHBIEL,--Your letter took a long week to reach ulations which interpose some extraordinary barriers, little Chinese walls, across the country below Me
The sa your ideas on the future of ret on reading your words,--”I ahly educated musician,” etc I had hoped (and still hope, and believe with all my heart, dear Krehbiel) that the Max Muller of Music would be none other than yourself Perhaps you will therefore pardon so about music