NEW ORLEANS, FEBRUARY 1881
My dear Krehbiel:
Your letter rises before me as I write like a tablet of white stone bearing a dead name. I see you standing beside me. I look into your eyes and press your hand and say nothing.
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Remember me kindly to Mrs. Krehbiel. I am sure you will soon have made a cosy little home in the metropolis. In my last letter I forgot to acknowledge the receipt of the musical articles, which do you the greatest credit, and which interested me much although I know nothing about music further than a narrow theatrical experience and a natural sensibility to its simpler forms of beauty enables me to do. I see your name also in the programme of The Studio, and hope to see the first number of that periodical containing your opening article. I should like one of these days to talk with you about the possibility of contributing a romantic—not musical—series of little sketches upon the creole songs and colored creoles of New Orleans, to some New York periodical. Until the summer comes, however, it will be difficult for me to undertake such a thing: the days here are much shorter than they are in your northern latitudes, the weather has been gloomy as Tartarus, and my poor imagination cannot rise on dampened wings in this heavy and murky atmosphere. This has been a hideous winter,—incessant rain, sickening weight of foul air, and a sky gray as the face of Melancholy. The city is half under water. The lake and the bayous have burst their bounds, and the streets are Venetian canals. Boats are moving over the sidewalks; and mocassin snakes swarm in the old stonework of the gutters. Several children have been bitten.
I am very weary of New Orleans. The first delightful impression it produced has vanished. The city of my dreams bathed in the gold of eternal summer, and perfumed with the amorous odors of orange flowers, has vanished like some of those phantom cities of Spanish America, swallowed up centuries ago by earthquakes, but reappearing at long intervals to deluded travellers. What remains is something horrible like the tombs here,—material and moral rottenness which no pen can do justice to. You must have read some of those medieval legends in which an amorous youth finds the beautiful witch he has embraced all through the night crumble into a mass of calcined bones and ashes in the morning. Well, I feel like such a one, and almost regret that unlike the victims of these diabolical illusions I do not find my hair whitened and my limbs withered by sudden age; for I enjoy exuberant vitality, and still seem to myself like one buried alive or left alone in some city cursed with desolation like those described by Sinbad the sailor. No literary circle here;—no jovial coterie of journalists;—no association save those vampire ones of which the less said the better. And the thought, When must all this end? may be laughed off in the daytime; but always returns to haunt me like a ghost in the night.
Your friend
L Hearn