It was a fragrant night—a night rich with sweet flower-scents, not
only from the flower beds near, but coming from afar on the breeze.
Hilary stood at the gate, leaning on it and looking away at the sky,
where a faint streak of different light told of the sun’s coming. It
was quite clear, though there had been no moonlight; one of those
warm, still nights when it is easy to find one’s way, though hard to
see into the face of one near by, a night when one walks in a dream
amid changing shadows, and when the outer mysteriousness and the
dimness of one’s soul are as one. So with Hilary; so had he walked
to the gate. He waited for the woman he loved, the only woman any
man could ever love, having once known her. And yet no fever burned
now in his veins, no intoxication mounted from his heart to his
brain. Standing there, and regarding himself and his own feelings
very quietly in the stillness, it seemed to him as if he had died
yesterday when that wild cry had been unknowingly uttered; as if his
soul or his heart, or, indeed, his very self had gone forth in it.
A light touch was laid on his shoulder, and then the gate was
opened. He passed through and walked by Fleta up the flower-bordered
pathway. She moved on without speaking, her white cloak hanging
loose from her neck, and her bare arms gleaming as it fell back from
them.
“You who know so much tell me something,” said Hilary. “Why are you
so wise?”
“Because I burned my soul out centuries ago,” said Fleta. “When you
have burned out your heart you will be strong as I am.”
“Another question,” said Hilary. “Why did you fail in that
initiation?”
Fleta stopped suddenly, and fixed fierce questioning eyes upon him.
She was terrible in this quick rush of anger. But Hilary looked on
her unmoved. It seemed to him that nothing would ever be able to
move him again. Was he dead indeed that he could thus endure the
scorching light of those brilliant eyes?
“What makes you ask me that?” cried Fleta in a voice of pain. “Do
you demand to know?”
“Yes; I do wish to know.”
For a moment Fleta covered her face with her hands, and her whole
form shrank and quivered. But only for a moment; then she dropped
her hands at each side and stood erect, her queenly head poised
royally.
“It is my punishment,” she said in a murmuring voice, “to discover
so soon how absolute are the bonds of the Great Order; how the pupil
can command the master as well as the master the pupil.”
Then she turned abruptly upon Hilary, approaching him more nearly,
while she spoke in a quick, fierce voice.
“Because, though I have burned out my soul, I have not burned out my
heart! Because, though I cannot love as men do, and have almost
forgotten what passion means, yet I can still worship a greater
nature than my own so deeply that it may be called love. I have not
learned to stand utterly alone and to know myself as great as any
other with the same possibilities, the same divinity in myself. I
still lean on another, look to another, hunger for the smile of
another. O, folly, when I know so well that I cannot find any rest
while that is in me. O, Ivan, my teacher, my friend, what torture it
is to wrest the image of you from its shrine within me. Powers and
forces of indifferent Nature, I demand your help!”
She raised her arms as she uttered this invocation, and it struck
Hilary at the moment how little like a human being she looked. She
might have been the spirit of the dawn. Her voice had become
unutterably weird and mournful, like the deep cry of a broken soul.
Without pausing for any answer she dropped her arms, drew her cloak
around her, and walked away over the dewy grass. Hilary, as silent,
as mournful, but seemingly without emotion, dropped his head and
quietly followed her track. Of old—only yesterday—what an age
ago!—he would have kept his eyes fixed on her shining dark hair or
the movements of her delicate figure. Suddenly Fleta stopped, turned
and confronted him. He raised his eyes in surprise and looked at
her.
“You are no longer devoured by jealousy,” she said. “You can hear me
speak as I did just now without its turning you into a savage. What
has happened?”
Her eyes seemed to penetrate his impassive and languid expression,
looking for the soul beneath. She was longing that his answer should
be the one she needed.
“I am hopeless,” answered Hilary.
“Of what?”
“Of your love. I understand at last that you have a great purpose in
your life, and that I am a mere straw on a stream. I thought I had
some claim on you; I see I cannot have. I surrender myself to your
will. That is all I have left to do.”
Fleta stood meditatively for a moment Then she looked up very sadly
in his face.
“It is not enough,” she said. “Your gift must be a positive one.”
Then she again turned and went on her way to the house. Here
everything was silent and even dark, for the shutters were all
closed, and evidently the place was deserted. Fleta opened a side
door with a key which was attached to her girdle; they entered and
she locked it behind them. She led the way through the quiet dim
house to the door of the laboratory; they entered the room in
silence. It wore a quite new aspect to Hilary’s eyes, and he looked
round in wonder. All was pale; there was no incense burning, no
lamps were lit; the colour had gone from the walls; a faint grey
light through a skylight, which had always hitherto been curtained,
dimly broke on the darkness of the room which still lurked deeply in
the lower part. But Hilary found enough light to see that the thing
he so hated was not present; that lay figure which was to him always
such a horror was gone.
“Where is it?” he said after a moment, wondering at the sense of
relief with which its absence filled him.
“What?—oh! the figure. Again you ask a question which I am compelled
to answer. Well, I cannot use that power at present; I have again to
win the right.”
“How did you win the right before?” asked Hilary, fixing his eyes on
her; a fierce desire to know this possessed him.
Fleta started, turned towards him, and for a moment the proud
imperiousness which ordinarily characterised her came over her form
and her features. But in another moment it was gone. She stood
before him, pale, gentle and sublime.
“I will tell you,” she said in a clear yet very low voice. “By
taking your life.”
Hilary looked at her in complete perplexity and bewilderment.
“Do you not remember,” she said, “that forest, that new earth and
sky, all so sweet and strong, that wealth of apricot blossom that
came between us and the sky? Ah, Hilary, how fresh and vivid life
was then, while we lived and loved and understood not that we did
either! Was it not sweet? I loved you. Yes, I loved you—loved you.”
Her voice broke and trembled. Hilary’s numbed heart suddenly sprang
again to life. Never had her voice contained such tones of
tenderness and passion before.
“Oh, my dear, my Fleta, you love me still—now!”
He sprang towards her, but she seemed to sweep him aside with one
majestic action of her bare arm.
“With that passion,” she said, with a pale solemnity, “I can never
love now. I have not forgotten entirely what such love is—no,
Hilary, I have not forgotten—else how should I have found you again
among the multitudes of the earth?” She held out her hand to him,
and, as he clasped it, he felt it was soft and tender, that the warm
life blood of a young creature responded to his touch. “I knew you
by your dear eyes which once were so full of pure love for me that
they were like stars in my life.”
“What came between us?” asked Hilary.
She looked strangely at him, drew her hand away, folded her cloak
round her and then answered in one word:
“Passion!”
“I remember it now!” cried Hilary in sudden excitement “My God! I
see your beautiful wild face before me, I see your lips as lovely as
the soft blossom above us. Fleta, I loved you as men love—I hungered
for you—what harm lay in that?”
“None,” she answered, standing now motionless and statue-like,
wrapped in her long, white cloak, seeming like a lovely ghost rather
then a living woman. “None—for men who care only to be men, to
reproduce men, to be and to do nothing more than that! But I had
another power within me, that seemed stronger than myself—a stirring
of the dumb soul within. When that moment came, Hilary, then came
the great decision, the fierce struggle between two souls hurled
together out of the dimness of life, and finding light in the fever
of love—yes, light!—the fire that is love makes it possible for men
to live. It gives them hope, it animates them, it makes them believe
in a future, it enables them to create men to fill that future.
“In those old days beneath those apricot blossoms, you and I,
Hilary, were but children on this earth, new to its meaning, knowing
nothing of its purpose. How could we guide ourselves? We were
ignorant of the great power of sex, we were only at the beginning of
its lesson. So it must be with all. They must go through with the
lesson, they cannot guess it from the first! Nor could we. I did not
know what I did, Hilary, my lover, when I took your life. Had I
known I should only have been like a beast of prey. But I did not
know. You asserted your power—you claimed me. I asserted mine—I
conquered. I wanted power; and killing you as I did with that one
emotion only stirring within me, I got what I longed for. Not at
once—not till I had suffered patiently, not till I had struggled
hard to understand myself and the force that was at work within me.
And this for life after life, incarnation after incarnation. You not
only loved me but you were mine—I conquered you and used your life
and love for my own ends—to add to my power, to actually create the
life and strength I needed. By your life, by your strength, I became
a magician, read by my insight the mysteries of alchemy and the
buried secrets of power. Yes, Hilary, it is so. To you I owe myself.
I have become free from the common burdens of humanity, its
passions, its personal desires, its weary repetitions of experiences
till their edge grows blunted by long usage. I have seen the
Egyptian and the Roman, men of the old superb civilisations, trying
to reproduce their past pleasures, their past magnificence to-day,
in this modern life. It is useless, life after life full of
selfishness and pleasure, ends in the weariness of living that kills
men’s souls and darkens their thought. But you and I, Hilary, have
escaped from this dismal fate. I would not be content to live again
as I had lived before, to use the life principle which lies in love,
only for pleasure or the bringing of eidolons on to the earth. I
determined to rise, to raise myself, to raise you, and out of our
love perpetually to create something nobler than we ourselves. I
have succeeded, Hilary, I have succeeded. We stand now before the
gate of the first initiation. I tried to enter it and failed for
want of strength—for want of strength, Hilary! I could not pluck my
master’s image utterly out of my soul—I looked for him to lean on—at
least to find comfort in seeing that face I knew. Give me strength,
Hilary! Be my comrade! Help me to enter and your strength shall come
back to you a hundredfold. For your reward shall be that you too
shall enter with me.”
She had changed from moment to moment as she spoke. She looked like
an inspired priestess—like a Divine being. Now she stood like a
flame with a strange appearance, as if her whole soul and self,
spirit and body, rose upwards in adoration. The dawn had come; the
first rays of the sun shot through the skylight and fell on her
transfigured face and gleaming hair.
Hilary looked at her as a worshipper might look at his idol.
“I am yours,” he said, “but I know not how to prove it.”
She held out her hand to him, and lowered her eyes from the light to
which they had been raised until they met his.
“We must discover the great secret together, Hilary. No longer may
you give yourself to me without knowledge. Hitherto our lives have
been but the lives of the blossom; now we must be wise and enter the
state when the fruit comes. We have to find out what that power is
which the sun represents to us; to discover the pure creative power.
But we have not strength yet, Hilary; alas! I dread and fear
sometimes. More strength means more sacrifice.”
She drew her cloak closer round her, the light faded from her eyes
and face, and turning away she went and sat down on a couch which
was back in the shadow. Hilary felt a profound sense of sadness, of
sympathy, of sorrow, sweep over his being. He followed her and sat
down beside her. One pale hand lay on the couch, outside her cloak.
He laid his upon it, and fell deep into thought. Thus they sat,
silent, breathing softly, for long hours, till the sun was high. But
still, even then, the room was very dim and cool, and full of
shadows.