A Dead Love by Lafcadio Hearn

“A Dead Love” was first published on 21 October 1880, in The New Orleans Item. On 6 April 1884, The Times-Democrat published a slightly revised version of the story under the title “L’Amour après la Mort“. In 1914, a decade after the author’s death, Houghton Mifflin published Fantastics and Other Fancies, an anthology of Hearn’s work that contained both versions of the story—other than slightly different wording in places, there is not much difference between them.

“A Dead Love” is a subtle horror story, where death offers no neither release nor redemption; only a horrible purgatory where the soul is imprisoned in the decaying body that used to be its sanctuary.

 

About Lafcadio Hearn

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was a writer, teacher, and translator, who had a very productive life and was a prolific author of speculative fiction. He was Born 27 June 1850, on the Ionian Island of Lefkada, but spent most of his early life in Dublin, Ireland.

When he was 19 years old, Hearn emigrated to the USA and began working as a newspaper reporter. Following a stint working for a newspaper in New Orleans, he became a correspondent to the French West Indies, remaining on the island of Martinique for two years, before relocating to Japan, where he spent the rest of his life. In 1891, he married Setsuko Koizumi, a lady from a high-ranking Samurai family. The couple had four children.

Hearn’s writings about Japan were fundamental in providing the Western world with an insight into what was then an unfamiliar culture. In 1894, many of his articles and essays were collected and published as the two-volume book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.

Hearn was at his most prolific between 1896 and 1903, while working as professor of English literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo. He wrote four books during this time, including a collection of supernatural stories called Ghostly Japan (1899).

In addition to producing his own work, Hearn also a translated many of Guy de Maupassant’s stories from French to English.

Lafcadio Hearn died in Tokyo, on 26 September 1904.

 

A Dead Love

by Lafcadio Hearn

(Online Text)

He knew no rest; for all his dreams were haunted by her; and when he sought love, she came as the dead come between the living. So that, weary of his life, he passed away at last in the fevered summer of a tropical city; dying with her name upon his lips. And his face was no more seen in the palm-shadowed streets; but the sun rose and sank as before.

And that vague phantom life, which sometimes lives and thinks in the tomb where the body moulders, lingered and thought within the narrow marble bed where they laid him with the pious hope,—que en paz descansa![1]

Yet so weary of his life had the wanderer been that he could not even find the repose of the dead. And while the body sank into dust the phantom man found no rest in the darkness, and thought to himself, “I am even too weary to rest!”

There was a fissure in the wall of the tomb. And through it, and through the meshes of the web that a spider had spun across it, the dead looked, and saw the summer sky blazing like amethyst; the palms swaying in the breezes from the sea; the flowers in the shadows of the sepulchres; the opal fires of the horizon; the birds that sang, and the river that rolled its whispering waves between tall palms and vast-leaved plants to the heaving emerald of the Spanish Main. The voices of women and sounds of argentine[2] laughter and of footsteps and of music, and of merriment, also came through the fissure in the wall of the tomb;—sometimes also the noise of the swift feet of horses, and afar off the drowsy murmur made by the toiling heart of the city. So that the dead wished to live again; seeing that there was no rest in the tomb.

And the gold-born days died in golden fire; —and the moon whitened nightly the face of the earth; and the perfume of the summer passed away like a breath of incense;—but the dead in the sepulchre could not wholly die.

The voices of life entered his resting-place; the murmur of the world spoke to him in the darkness; the winds of the sea called to him through the crannies of the tomb. So that he could not rest. And yet for the dead there is no consolation of tears!

The stars in their silent courses looked down through the crannies of the tomb and passed on; the birds sang above him and flew to other lands; the lizards ran noiselessly above his bed of stone and as noiselessly departed; the spider at last ceased to renew her web of magical silk; the years came and went as before, but for the dead there was no rest!

And it came to pass that after many tropical moons had waxed and waned, and the summer was come, with a presence sweet as a fair woman’s,—making the drowsy air odorous about her,—that she whose name was uttered by his lips when the Shadow of Death fell upon him, came to that city of palms, and to the ancient place of burial, and even to the tomb that was nameless.

And he knew the whisper of her robes; and from the heart of the dead man a flower sprang and passed through the fissure in the wall of the tomb and blossomed before her and breathed out its soul in passionate sweetness.

But she, knowing it not, passed by; and the sound of her footsteps died away forever!

Lafcadio Hearn (1850 — 1904)

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1.  Que en paz descansa!: This is a Spanish term. En paz descansa! Would translate as “rest in peace”. However, in this case, the presence of “que” tells us that the people, who interred the dead man, laid him on his “narrow marble bed” with “the pious hope” that he would rest in peace.

2. In the context of the story, argentine describes a silvery sound. So argentine laughter indicates a ringing and musical type of laughter—even a joyous laughter. [argentine @ Merriam-Webster]

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