CHAPTER VI.
Before I finish writing of the confused memories I have of the
commencement of my life I wish to speak of another ray of sunshine--a
sad ray this time,--that has left an ineffaceable impression upon me,
and the meaning of which will never be clear to me.
Upon a Sunday, after we had returned from church, the ray appeared to
me. It came through a half-open window and fell into the stairway, and
as it lengthened itself upon the whiteness of the wall it took on a
peculiar, weird shape.
I had returned from church with my mother and as I mounted the stairs
I took her hand. The house was filled with a humming silence peculiar
to the noontime of very hot summer days (it was August or September).
Following the habit of our country the shutters were half closed
making indoors, during the heated period of the day, a sort of
twilight.
As I entered the house there came to me an appreciation of the
stillness of Sunday that in the country and in peaceful byways of
little towns is like the peace of death. But when I saw the ray of
sunlight fall obliquely through the staircase window, I had a feeling
more poignant than ordinary sorrow; I had a feeling altogether
incomprehensible and absolutely new in which there seemed infused a
conception of the brevity of life's summers, their rapid flight and
the incomputable ages of the sun. But other elements still more
mysterious, that it would be impossible for me to explain even
vaguely, entered therein.
I wish to add to the history of this ray of sunshine the sequel that
is intimately connected with it. Years passed; I became a man, and
after having been among many people and experienced many adventures I
lived for an autumn and winter in an isolated house in an unfrequented
part of Stamboul. It was there that every evening at approximately the
same hour, a ray of sunlight came in through the window and fell
obliquely on the wall and lit up the niche (hollowed out of the stone
wall) in which I had placed an Athenian vase. And I never saw that ray
of sunlight without thinking of the one I had seen upon that Sunday of
long ago; nor without having the same, precisely the same sad emotion,
scarcely diminished by time, and always full of the same mystery. And
when I had to leave Turkey, when I was obliged to quit my dangerous
but adored lodgings in Stamboul, with all my busy and hurried
preparations for departure there was mingled this strange regret:
never more should I see the oblique ray of sunshine come into the
stairway window and fall upon the niche in the wall where the Greek
vase stood.
Perhaps under all of this there may have been, if not recollections of
a previous personal experience, at least the reflected inchoate
thoughts of ancestors which I am unable in any clearer way to bring
out of darkness. But enough! I must say no more, for I again find
myself in the land of vague fancy, gliding phantoms and illusive
nothings.
For this almost unintelligible chapter there is no excuse that I can
offer, save that I have written it with the greatest frankness and
sincerity.
