One Day
After Early Dinner My Mother And Sisters Went In The Carriage To Pay A
Visit To A Neighbouring Estancia, And My Brothers Being Out Or Absent
From Home I Was Left Alone.
The verandah appeared to me the warmest
place I could find, as the sun shone on it warm and
Bright, and there
I settled down on a chair placed against the wall at the side of a
heap of sacks of meal or something which had been left there, and
formed a nice shelter from the wind.
The house was strangely quiet, and the westering sun shining full on
me made me feel quite comfortable, and in a little while I fell
asleep. The sun set and it grew bitterly cold, but I did not wake, and
when my mother returned and inquired for me I could not be found.
Finally the whole household turned out with lanterns and searched for
me up and down through the plantation, and the hunt was still going on
when, about ten o'clock at night, some one hurrying along the verandah
stumbled on me in my sheltered corner by the sacks, still in my chair
but unconscious and in a burning fever. It was the dread typhus, an
almost obsolete malady in Europe, and in fact in all civilized
countries, but not uncommon at that date in the pestilential city. It
was wonderful that I lived through it in a place where we were out of
reach of doctors and apothecaries, with only my mother's skill in
nursing and her knowledge of such drugs as were kept in the house to
save me. She nursed me day and night for the three weeks during which
the fever lasted, and when it left me, a mere shadow of my former
self, I was dumb-not even a little Yes or No could I articulate
however hard I tried, and it was at last concluded that I would never
speak again. However, after about a fortnight, the lost faculty came
back, to my mother's inexpressible joy.
Winter was nearing its end when one morning in late July I ventured
out of doors for the first time, though still but a skeleton, a shadow
of my former self. It was a windy day of brilliant sunshine, a day I
shall never forget, and the effect of the air and the sun and smell of
earth and early flowers, and the sounds of wild birds, with the sight
of the intensely green young grass and the vast crystal dome of heaven
above, was like deep draughts of some potent liquor that made the
blood dance in my veins. Oh what an inexpressible, immeasurable joy to
be alive and not dead, to have my feet still on the earth, and drink
in the wind and sunshine once more! But the pleasure was more than I
could endure in that feeble state; the chilly wind pierced me like
needles of ice, my senses swam, and I would have fallen to the ground
if my elder brother had not caught me in his arms and taken me back to
the house.
In spite of that fainting fit I was happy again with the old
happiness, and from day to day I regained strength, until one day in
early August I was suddenly reminded that it was my anniversary by my
brothers and sisters all coming to me with birthday presents, which
they had been careful to provide beforehand, and congratulations on my
recovery.
Fifteen years old! This was indeed the most memorable day of my life,
for on that evening I began to think about myself, and my thoughts
were strange and unhappy thoughts to me-what I was, what I was in the
world for, what I wanted, what destiny was going to make of me! Or was
it for me to do just what I wished, to shape my own destiny, as my
elder brothers had done? It was the first time such questions had come
to me, and I was startled at them. It was as though I had only just
become conscious; I doubt that I had ever been fully conscious before.
I had lived till now in a paradise of vivid sense-impressions in which
all thoughts came to me saturated with emotion, and in that mental
state reflection is well-nigh impossible. Even the idea of death,
which had come as a surprise, had not made me reflect. Death was a
person, a monstrous being who had sprung upon me in my flowery
paradise and had inflicted a wound with a poisoned dagger in my flesh.
Then had come the knowledge of immortality for the soul, and the wound
was healed, or partly so, for a time at all events; after which the
one thought that seriously troubled me was that I could not always
remain a boy. To pass from boyhood to manhood was not so bad as dying;
nevertheless it was a change painful to contemplate. That everlasting
delight and wonder, rising to rapture, which was in the child and boy
would wither away and vanish, and in its place there would be that
dull low kind of satisfaction which men have in the set task, the
daily and hourly intercourse with others of a like condition, and in
eating and drinking and sleeping. I could not, for example, think of
so advanced an age as fifteen without the keenest apprehension. And
now I was actually at that age-at that parting of the ways, as it
seemed to me.
What, then, did I want?-what did I ask to have? If the question had
been put to me then, and if I had been capable of expressing what was
in me, I should have replied: I want only to keep what I have; to rise
each morning and look out on the sky and the grassy dew-wet earth from
day to day, from year to year. To watch every June and July for
spring, to feel the same old sweet surprise and delight at the
appearance of each familiar flower, every new-born insect, every bird
returned once more from the north.
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