“In return for the almond blossom, I will show you a white hawthorn
which came out last night over there.”
I felt as though they were speaking of their most intimate
possessions, and, like the virgin of Fontebranda, intended to say: “We
are ourselves a garden.”
As I could not express what I felt, I said only empty words.
“Show me the way, then,” I said; “I am sure to come across some
memories, at any rate of my early reading, which used to be fairy
tales.”
“Poor fairies without wands!” observed Oddo, taking Anatolia’s hand
with a caressing gesture.
And in the eyes of the maidens were smiles full of despair.
Then Violante led us through a labyrinth.
We walked among evergreens, among ancient box-trees, laurels, myrtles,
whose wild old age had forgotten its early discipline. In a few places
here and there there was some trace of the symmetrical shapes carved
once upon a time by the gardener’s shears; and with a melancholy not
unlike his who searches on marble tombstones for the effigies of the
forgotten dead, I noted carefully among the silent plants those traces
of humanity not altogether obliterated. A bitter-sweet odour hung round
our path, and from time to time one of us, as if wishing to weave
afresh an unravelled web, would reconstruct some memory of our far-off
childhood. And now the shadow of my mother rose pure and clear before
me, and seemed to feed upon all the things which our hearts exhaled in
the broken silences, and she never left Anatolia’s side, thus showing
me her preference. And a bitter-sweet odour hung over our melancholy.
Violante stopped and asked me, almost with the same look and in the
same tone as when she spoke to me at the window--
“Do you hear?”
“Now we are in your kingdom,” I said to her, “because you are the queen
of the fountains.”
The hoarse song of the water came to us through a high myrtle hedge as
we stood in a little meadow strewn with daffodils, and guarded by a
statue of Pan green with moss. A delicious softness seemed to spring in
my veins from the soft turf my feet pressed, and once again the sudden
joy of living took away my breath. At the same time, the presence
of the two brothers oppressed me, and pity for them grew stronger.
“Ah, how I could stir your sealed-up souls to the very depths!” I
thought, as I looked at the three prisoners. “How I could quicken into
anguish the troubled feelings within you!” And I pictured the delight
of enjoying these fresh souls full of the sap of life, rare fruits
which had slowly ripened in the garden of self-knowledge, and were
here still intact to slake my thirst. And my regret was the greater,
because I knew that never again could I renew that unique charm of
first acquaintance between beings whose destinies are fated to be
united; that unique and fleeting charm, in which are mingled marvel,
and expectation, and presentiment, and hope, and a thousand indefinable
things which partake of the nature of dreams, vain things indeed, yet
issuing from the most sacred depths of life.
Everything looked soft and rich through the transparency of the amber
air, and everywhere thoughts of beauty worthy of being gathered sprang
into flower, and the noblest flowered at the feet of the desolate
princesses, where I imagined myself stooping to gather them. And I
imagined the delight of caressing and troubling those souls while
wandering through the cloistered garden, over whom the phantoms of
the ancient seasons seemed to be weaving a veil of poetry--a veil
into which were woven with almost invisible threads strange figures
of unknown beings laughing and weeping in the alternations of joy and
sorrow.
In every one of these fountains was there not a Pantea singing, the
pure victim of a wicked and sublime passion? Certainly an extraordinary
feeling came over me when Violante led me beyond the myrtles into
the long alley enclosed between the shrubbery and the eastern wall.
Here reigned that mysterious spirit which fills such lonely spots
as tradition tells us were wont to be the meeting-place of lovers,
celebrated for the tragic splendour of their fate. The statues, the
pillars, the very trunks of the trees wore the aspect of things which
have been witnesses and accomplices of a great human passion, and
perpetuate the memory of it to all time. The deep injuries of devouring
time and the inclement seasons had given to the outlines of the stone
that expression, I might almost say that eloquence, which ruins alone
possess. Noble thoughts seem to rise from the broken lines.
And I imagined the delight of disclosing my magnificent dream here
to the three _blessed ones_ who alone could transform it into living
harmony; I imagined the delight of talking of love in that very place
where the virtue of so many symbols united to raise the soul above the
common griefs of humanity and expand it in the supreme heaven of beauty.
* * * * *
We were walking slowly, pausing from time to time, and speaking to hide
the uneasiness which troubled us; Oddo and Antonello seemed tired, they
lingered a few steps behind and were gloomily silent. And I felt as
though the shadows of sickness and death were behind me.
My fervour had cooled. I felt the crudeness of the contrast between
my impetuous eagerness and the miserable necessity which clung fast
to my side, and was around me everywhere in that great cloister full
of forgotten and perishing things. I felt that each one of those
beings who in that very same hour had been so often illuminated by
my intellect and transfigured by my passion, still kept her secret
intact, and that the language of her form could not reveal it to me. As
I looked at them, I saw each far away from the other, each a stranger
to the other, each with an unfathomed thought between her brows, each
with an unfathomed sentiment in her heart. I was about to go away and
return to my solitude; our day was near its end. What new things had
that first intercourse aroused in their souls, weary with the long
monotony of sorrow, which had ceased perhaps to be brightened by any
ray of hope in the unforeseen? Under what aspect had I appeared to
each? Had their longing for love and happiness yearned towards me with
an uncontrollable impulse, or did a suspicious incredulity like that of
their two brothers hinder them from trusting me?
They were walking thoughtfully by my side, and even when they spoke
they seemed so deeply absorbed, that more than once I was on the point
of asking: “What are you thinking about?” And a violent desire arose
in me to extort from them the secret they were holding so close; and
the bold words which can suddenly unlock a closed heart, and surprise
the most secret pain and force it to confession, rose to my lips. But
at the same time a pitiful tenderness moved me almost to ask their
pardon for the pain they might be suffering at my hand, and for a
sharper pain which they were to suffer in the future. The necessity of
choice presented itself to me as a cruel trial, a cause of sorrow and
inevitable sacrifices. Did I not feel a vehement anxiety filling up the
pauses in our restless conversation?
“Oh, when summer comes!” sighed Violante, lifting up her eyes to the
spreading umbrella pines. “In summer I spend the whole day here alone
with my fountains. And it is the time of the tuberoses!”
Gigantic pines with straight round stems like the masts of a vessel
grew at equal distances in a row along the wall of the cloister and
protected it with their thick cupolas. Between stem and stem, like the
spaces between columns, were niches hollowed in the wall and inhabited
by nude statues or robed figures in calm attitudes, their blind
divinity calling up visions of the past. At equal distances the seven
fountains projected in the shape of little temples; each one composed
of a wide basin in which deities sitting on the brink or leaning on the
urn of water gazed at their own reflection framed between the two pairs
of columns which supported a pediment carved with a couplet. Opposite
them rose the great myrtle hedge, a mass of green only broken by the
white pensive statues. And the damp ground was almost entirely covered
with moss as soft as velvet, which rendered our steps noiseless and
heightened the sweetness of the mystery.
“Can you read the verses?” asked Violante, as she saw me intent on
deciphering the letters cut in the stone, and effaced here and there by
mould and cracks. “I once knew what they meant.”
They said: “Hasten, hasten! Weave garlands of fair roses to girdle the
passing hours.”
PRÆCIPITATE MORAS, VOLUCRES CINGATIS UT HORAS
NECTITE FORMOSAS, MOLLIA SERTA, ROSAS.
It was only the ancient precept, sweetened by rhyme, which for
centuries has incited men to enjoy the pleasures of our brief life,
has kindled the kisses on lovers’ lips, and multiplied the number of
goblets at the banquet. It was the old voluptuous melody, modulated on
the new instrument which an industrious monk had fashioned in the shape
of a dove’s wing out of the various reeds left in the forsaken garden
of Pan, and bound together with the wax of votive lights and the
threads of old altar linen.
“The fountain gleams and babbles; and saith to thee in its splendour:
'Rejoice!’ and in its murmur speaks of Love.”
FONS LUCET, PLAUDE, ELOQUITUR FONS LUMINE: GAUDE.
FONS SONAT, ADCLAMA, MURMURE DICIT: AMA.
The rugged rhymes with their eternal commentary of running water threw
a vague spell over my spirit. I could hear in those echoes the veiled
accents of the melancholy which adds an indefinable grace to pleasure,
and by troubling it gives it greater depth. No less soft and sad were
the divine youthful figures that stretched their bare limbs over the
margin in curves as graceful as those of the mirror into which they had
so long been gazing.
“Weep here, ye lovers who come to slake your thirst. Too sweet is the
water. Season it with the salt of your tears.”
FLETE HIC OPTANTES, NIMIS EST AQUA DULCIS, AMANTES
SALSUS, UT APTA VEHAM, TEMPERET HUMOR EAM.
Thus the gentle fountain, envying the savour of tears, pointed out
to the joyous the subtle art of imparting a touch of bitterness to
the fullest enjoyment. “It is well to mix among the roses some dewy
flower of the deadly hellebore, scarcely distinguishable from the rest
of the garland, so that thus redeemed the head may from time to time
be bent.” It seemed as if step by step, on that long Way of Love,
enjoyment became more collected, wiser, and yet more passionate. The
liquid mirrors invited lovers to lay down heads heavy with dreams, and
to gaze at their own reflections, until, having at last attained to
perceiving in them only symbols of unknown beings risen into the light
from an inaccessible world, they may better realise the presence of the
unspeakably strange and remote in their own lives. “Lean over to your
reflections that your kisses may be doubled by the mirror.”
OSCULA JUCUNDA UT DUPLICENTUR IMAGINE IN UNDA
VULTUS HIC VERO CERNITE FONTE MERO.
Was not that simple action a token revealing a hidden thing? The two
lovers bending over the reflection of their caress unconsciously
figured the mystic power of voluptuous enjoyment, which consists in
banishing for a few moments from our souls the unknown man whom we all
carry hidden within us, and thus rendering him as remote and strange
as a phantom. Does not the dim vagueness of such a sentiment perhaps
increase the delirium and produce the terror of lovers who in the
mirrors of deep alcoves admire the reflection of their mutual caresses
repeated by figures in their own likeness, yet immeasurably unlike and
remote in their supernatural silence? With a confused consciousness of
the extraordinary alienation taking place within them, they think they
have found an enlightening symbol of it in those outward images, which
analogy leads them no longer to consider as visible objects, but as
inexplicable forms of life, and finally as visions of death.
This was the vision called up by the last of the musical fountains, as
Violante’s face bent over it and the shadow of the pines fell slowly
like a dark blue veil. “Here did Pleasure and Death admire their united
reflection, and their two faces were fused into one.”
SPECTARUNT NUPTAS HIC SE MORS ATQUE VOLUPTAS
UNUS [FAMA FERAT] QUUM DUO, VULTUS ERAT.
A soft white cloud passed by and veiled the sun, and the air became
softer still; it was like transparent milk into which some perfume had
been emptied. And the cadence of the Latin couplets rang in my ears as
we walked through enclosed meadows yellow with daffodils, where one
could imagine the scenes of a pastoral _fête_ held under tents wreathed
with garlands. On the base of a statue of a nymph who had lost both her
arms was carved the emblem of the Arcadian Academy: the fountain with
seven pipes within a laurel wreath.
“Were you not here this morning?” I said to Violante, as I recognised
her close by the box-wood arch under which she had first appeared to me.
She smiled, and I thought a momentary flash of colour passed over her
cheeks. Only a few hours had passed, and I was amazed to find how the
exact notion of time had escaped me. That short interval seemed full of
confused events which gave it, to my consciousness, a deceptive length
without any fixed limits. I was not yet able to sound the gravity of
the life I had lived since the moment I had put foot in the cloister;
but I felt that some dim change, fraught with incalculable results, was
being worked within me quite apart from my own will; and I thought
that, after all, the presentiment of the morning on the lonely road had
not been vain.
“Why shouldn’t we sit down?” asked Antonello almost entreatingly. “Are
you not tired yet?”
“Yes, let us sit down,” assented Anatolia, with her usual gentle
condescension. “I am a little tired too. It is the spring air.... What
a smell of violets!”
“But where is your white hawthorn?” I exclaimed, turning to Massimilla
to show her that I had not forgotten her offer.
“It is a long way off still,” she replied.
“Where?”
“Down there.”
“Massimilla has her hiding-places,” said Anatolia, laughing. “When she
hides no one can find her.”
“Like a little ferret,” I added.
“And then,” she continued playfully, “she alludes every now and then to
some small wonder known to herself alone, but she does it cautiously,
keeping her secret to herself, without giving in the least bit to our
curiosity. To-day with her white hawthorn she has made you the object
of special favour.”
The novice kept her eyes turned downwards, but laughter quivered on her
eyelashes and lit up her whole face.
“Some day,” the kind sister went on, pleased to have called up the
unwonted ray, “some day I will tell you the story of the hedgehog and
the four little blind hedgehogs.”
Then Massimilla burst into such clear youthful laughter, which clothed
her in such unusual freshness, that I stood amazed as if a miracle of
grace had taken place.
“Ah, don’t listen to Anatolia!” she said, without looking at me. “She
is laughing at me.”
“The story of the hedgehog and the four little blind hedgehogs!” I
said, drinking in with delight this sudden vein of gaiety which crossed
our melancholy. “But you are a very pattern of Franciscan perfection!
We must add another little flower to the _Fioretti_: 'How Sister Water
tamed the wild hedgehog and gave it a nest that it might multiply,
according to the command of our Creator!’ Tell me, tell me the story.”
The Clare laughed with her dear Anatolia, and the subtle feeling of joy
spread to Violante also and to the two brothers, and for the first time
that day we were conscious of our youth.
What words can express the sweet strangeness of sudden laughter
unlocking the lips and shining in the eyes of the sorrow-stricken? The
first amazement of it lingered in my soul and seemed to cover all the
rest with a veil. The unusual emotion which had stirred Massimilla’s
slender breast took possession of me and disturbed the outlines of
previous impressions or melted them away altogether. The half-closed
mouth of the ecstatic saint was suddenly filled with a silvery rush of
sound, just as she was about to let scrolls of silence fall from the
motionless palms of her hands.
Nothing save the sound of that laughter could have conveyed to me the
depth of the unapproachable mystery which each of the virgins bore
within herself. Was it not a chance sign of that instinctive life
lying dormant like a heaped-up treasure in the very roots of their
physical existence? And did not that hidden tenacious life, weighed
down and yet not crushed by the knowledge of so much sorrow, contain
within it the germs of numberless energies? As a spring pours on
the dry rock the tokens of secret moisture underground, even so the
beautiful sudden laugh seemed to rise from that fount of natural joy
which the most miserable being still preserves in the depths of his
own unconsciousness. And thus above my emotion rose a proud and loving
thought: “I could make thee a creature of joy.”
And then my eyes armed themselves with new curiosity; and I was
assailed by an anxious desire to look, to gaze at, and observe the
three princesses more attentively, as if I had not seen them truly
before. And once more it struck me what a complicated enigma of lines
every feminine form is, and how difficult it is _to see_, not only the
soul but the body. Those hands, for instance, on whose long, slender
fingers I had placed my subtlest dreams like invisible rings, already
seemed different to me, and appeared as the receptacles of infinite
nameless forces from which marvellous generations of new things might
arise. And some strange analogy led me to imagine the anxiety and
horror which filled that young prince, who, imprisoned in a dark
place and obliged to choose his own destiny at the hands of silent
messengers, passed the whole night in feeling the fatal hands which
were stretched out to him in the darkness. Hands in the darkness--what
more fearful image of mystery can there be?
The bare hands of the three princesses rested in the light; and looking
at them, I thought of the infinite number of uncreated gestures
contained in them, and of the myriads of leaves bursting out in the
garden.
Anatolia smiled as she saw my intent look.
“Why are you looking so attentively at our hands? Are you a palmist?”
“Yes, I am a palmist,” I answered in jest.
“Then tell us our fortunes.”
“Show me your left hand.”
She held out her palm, and her sisters did the same. And I bent
over them, pretending to explore the lines of life, of fate, and of
happiness in each. “What are your fortunes?” I thought meanwhile as
I looked at these three fair hands stretched out as if to receive or
offer, and in the pause my trouble was fed by the thousand unexpressed
and inexplicable things generated by the silence. “Possibly even the
iron magnet of fate may be subject to those sudden changes which affect
the pointing of the magnetic needle in the compass. Possibly all the
energies of will that I feel within me, both clear and confused, are
already exercising their transforming power; and the deviating fortunes
may be tending towards a final event which shall work out my good. But
possibly also I may be the sport of an illusion born of my pride and
confidence, and my present state may be only that of a prisoner among
prisoners.”
Great was the silence during this pause; it was such that the
perception of the immensity of the voiceless things embraced by it
terrified me. The sun was still under a veil. Suddenly Antonello
started and turned quickly towards the palace as if some one had
called him. We all looked at him anxiously, and he looked at us with a
wandering gaze. The sisters laid down their hands.
“Well?” Anatolia asked me, with a shadow of preoccupation on her brow.
“What have you read?”
“I have read,” I replied, “but I cannot reveal.”
“Why?” she said, recovering her smile. “Is what you know so terrible?”
“It is not terrible,” I said; “indeed, it is joyful.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“For all of us or only for one?”
I hesitated an instant. Did she not penetrate into my perplexity with
her question and remind me of the necessary choice.
“You won’t answer!” she added.
“For all of you,” I replied.
“Even for me?” asked Massimilla dreamily.
“Even for you. Are you not going to take the veil by your own choice?
And are you not sure of attaining the blessedness which compensates for
total renunciation?”
As I looked straight into her eyes, she flushed with colour that
seemed almost violent contrasted with her pallor.
“'Be thou, be thou that fragrant flower which thou oughtest to be,
spreading its fragrance abroad in the sweet presence of God!’ Saint
Catherine wrote that for you.”
“You know Saint Catherine!” said the little novice, her eyes shining
with wonder through her blushes.
“She is my favourite saint,” I added, glad to see her astonishment,
and tempted by the pleasure of disturbing and dazzling her soul, which
seemed to me to be eager and easily shaken. “I love her for her purple
hue. In the Garden of self-knowledge she is like a rose of fire.”
The betrothed of Jesus looked at me almost incredulously; but the
desire of questioning and listening was painted in her face, and the
line of attention cast already a faint shadow on her brow.
“The book I had with me this morning,” she said, with a little tremble
in her voice as if she were revealing some intimate confidence, “was a
volume of her letters.”
“I noticed that like a good Franciscan you put a blade of grass in your
page for a mark. But that book contains another mark. The grass in it
burns on the edge of a furnace. The essence of her soul is all in those
words of hers: 'Fire and blood united by love!’ Do you remember them?”
“Oh, Massimilla,” interrupted Oddo, laughing, “you may dismiss your
spiritual father. Now you have found the true guide to the way of
perfection!”
We were sitting on the edge of an empty tank which had no doubt been
an ancient fish-pond; now it was almost entirely filled with soil, and
taken possession of by wild plants, among which violets were hidden--in
great numbers, to judge by their great fragrance. Close by was the
broken-down wall of box-wood, breathing out the same aroma from its
depths as had met me on my first entrance into the garden. I could see
the deserted alley with its mutilated statues and widowed urns through
the thin parts of the shrubs and through the arches.
“Is the day yet fixed for you to enter the convent?” I asked Massimilla.
“Not yet,” she replied, “but it is almost sure to be before Easter.”
“Very soon then. Too soon!”
Antonello got up, suddenly seized by unbearable agitation. We all
turned towards him. He looked at Anatolia with vague terror in his pale
eyes. Then he sat down again. An indefinable anxiety crept over us; it
seemed as if Antonello had imparted some of his distress to us.
“This time yesterday we were in the orchard among the almond blossom,”
said Oddo, with a shade of regret for a past pleasure in his voice.
Antonello’s words rose spontaneously in my mind: “We must bring them
here among the flowers.”
“We must all go back there some day,” I broke out cheerfully, to
destroy that strange atmosphere of fear and anxiety which, for some
unknown cause, was increasing over our minds. “We must make the most
of this beautiful springtime. In a week the whole valley will be in
flower. I propose to go all over it, up to Corace, to visit Scultro,
Secli, Linturno.... How happy I should be if I might have your company!
Would you not like to come? Won’t you set a good example, Donna
Anatolia?”
“Certainly,” she said. “You offer us just what we wish.”
“And you too, Donna Massimilla, will be allowed the recreation. Saint
Francis, as you know, composed the canticle of the Sun in the cell of
boughs which Saint Clara had made for him in the monastery garden.
According to the ancient rule, the woods, the rivers, the mountains,
and the hills must be your brothers and sisters. Travelling among them
is like making a votive pilgrimage.... And then in the deserted city
at Linturno there is the nave of a church still standing; and a great
Madonna in mosaic, standing solitary under the canopy of the apse....
I always remember it. It is a thing one cannot forget. Do you remember
it, Antonello?”
Antonello started at the sound of his name.
“What did you say?” he stammered in a confused voice.
And his poor drawn face expressed such suffering that I could not speak.
“Yes, yes, let us go, let us go,” he added, pretending to have heard;
and he rose, a prey to evident agitation. He had the air of a maniac,
he was so pale and tottering. “Let us go away from here! Anatolia, get
up....”
He spoke quite low, as if he feared to be overheard by some one in the
neighbourhood. His tone filled us with dread.
“Get up, Claudio. Let us go.”
Anatolia ran to him and took his hands.
“Here she is, here she comes!” he stammered, quite beside himself,
turning his pale eyes, diluted by the hallucination, towards the alley.
“Here she is! Do you hear?”
Perplexed and troubled as I was, I thought at first that he was
terrified by some phantom called up by his madness. But the sound of
approaching steps reached my ears also; and all at once I understood as
I saw the sedan chair appear between the walls of box.
There we stood, dumb, motionless, holding our breath as the strange
convoy passed along. In the icy silence which had fallen on us, like
that surrounding a bier, one could distinctly hear the poles carried by
the two servants creaking slightly in their places.
Then through the open window of the chair, against the background
of green velvet, I saw the face of the mad princess; it was
unrecognisable, disfigured, and swollen and bloodless, like a mask of
snow; the hair was piled on her brow like a diadem. Her great black
eyes blazed out of the opaque whiteness of her skin from beneath the
commanding arched eyebrows, their extraordinary splendour maintained
perhaps by the continual hallucination of fantastic pomp and luxury.
Her double chin hung down over the necklace round her throat. And this
pale inert mass suggested to my imagination the dream-figure of some
Byzantine empress of the time of a Nicephorus or a Basil, lying in her
golden litter.
“There, she sees us; she is stopping, she is getting out, and coming
towards us,” I fancied with growing uneasiness, half expecting some
proof of the reality of what seemed to me an unreal apparition on the
point of vanishing and of entering the void again like a dream when
one wakes. “There, she is calling some one, speaking to them, asking
who I am, questioning me....” In the silence I heard in imagination
the sound of her voice, the dialogue between the children doomed to
an inhuman sacrifice, and the mother whose madness had transported
her into another world; a world into which she was inevitably drawing
them all, one after the other. And in my horror I understood the deep
shudder of instinctive repugnance that had passed over Antonello as she
approached, something like the shudder which runs through the folded
flock at the approach of the wild beast who is going to devour them.
But she passed by without noticing us, without moving an eyelid, and
vanished among the ancient box-trees. Two maids, dressed in grey like
Béguines, pale with weariness, silent and sad, walked close behind the
sedan chair; their arms hung at their sides, and swung at every step
like the rosaries hanging from their waists, cold and inanimate.
As I rode back to Rebursa alone, I could see before me the pale swollen
face of the Princess Aldoina, and the gloomy fatigue of the servants,
and the two grey shadows following the chair, and all the details of
the strange procession. Some essential part of me had been left behind
in the great cloister, but still I felt in my inmost being the joy of
being alone again.
I recalled once more to my mind the gestures of farewell at the gate,
the marvellous depth in the eyes of the prisoners, and the dreamlike
view of the garden vanishing away behind the three beautiful forms. And
at the same time all the other phantoms of the intense life I had lived
in those few hours crowded into my soul like a store of varied and
disordered riches, gathered up that they might be rearranged for the
adornment of my secret kingdom.
“What opulence!” said the Dæmon, appearing to me, not without joy and
pride. “What magnificence in a single day! Thou couldest not have
better served thine end, which is to give life to everything, to
extract life from the most barren things. Now, dost thou acknowledge
the wisdom of my morning admonition? Dost thou not bless the sternness
of thy long restraint, since it now yields thee this intoxicating
fruit? Thy power of poetry, like thy will, has no limit. Everything
that is born and exists around thee is born and exists by reason of the
breath of thy will and thy poetry. And thou art nevertheless living in
a very real order of things, because nothing is more true in the world
than the things of poetry.”
The day was sinking over the undulating valley of the Saurgo, and the
slanting rays turned the brown fields into gold, while the light clouds
sat in a circle on peaks of rock resembling the highest seats in an
amphitheatre. They sat there in feminine attitudes, waiting for the
evening to robe them with purple.
“Now, thou couldest make even salt bear fruit,” said the Dæmon to me.
“Wherever thy spirit turns, abundance springs up. But thou hast with
thee also the favour of fortune; thou hast entered the unknown and
unforeseen not as one feeling his way and exploring with hesitation,
but as one who is expected and called to gather in the harvest on a
field where the richest fruit awaits him--fruit still intact, and ready
to fall into his hands whenever in sunshine or in shadow he pleases to
stretch them out. Thou hast entered a cloistered garden, delicious and
terrifying as the garden of the Hesperides. Happiness has smiled to
thee in three shapes, standing between madness and death, like statues
of pure white marble between two black columns. Is there not some
meaning for thee in that symbol?”
“Oh despot,” I replied, “there is surely some hidden meaning in the
symbol thou declarest to me, and I shall discover it. But since the
perfection of that trinity attracts me, and since it is necessary for
my purpose that I should choose, I am perplexed in spirit, and not
without fear of being deluded like a common mortal.”
And the Dæmon: “Not thy fears of the morning alone, but those of the
evening also are vain! Nor is that thy only error; for before now,
in the presence of the blessed ones, after having composed beautiful
music out of the beauty of their bare hands thou didst regret that
thou couldest not carry them all away at once to thy home; thou didst
rebel against the injuries of prejudice and custom. Now, in thus doing,
thou didst humble thyself, not only to own the power of the laws of
others, but also to disown the power of thy own ideal, which alone
is sacred. Why dost thou aspire to the legitimate possession of the
body when the ideal figures already adorn the house of thy dreams with
their triple grace? Thou couldest not remove the three prisoners from
their dungeon without breaking the enchantment which transfigures them.
Countless mysterious waves of affinity flow between the depths of those
lives and the silent places where they have suffered and awaited thee.
Their grace, their desolation, and their pride draw the fascination
which enthralled thee from the hidden virtue of innumerable elements.
Even so, noble plants, with their long roots subdivided into myriads
of fibres, absorb from the very bosom of the earth those immortal
energies which are pressed towards the light by the rising force in the
stalk, and are crowned in the miracle of the flower and the perfume.
Canst thou, oh Poet, imagine Eglae, Arethusa, or Iperthusa chased from
their garden? When Heracles, clothed with stars, penetrated into the
western paradise to rob its golden apples, he forbore to carry away the
daughters of Night, for even his brutal soul felt that he would have
defaced, and perhaps destroyed, the heavenly mystery of their beauty.”
“Oh despot,” I said then, “I am thinking of Him who is to come.”
And the Dæmon: “It is well that this should be always the sum of thy
thoughts. But once before, the necessity of choice appeared to thee
as a cruel trial, a source of sorrow and inevitable sacrifice, and
thy heart shrank from it. Reflect that there is no goddess so worthy
of being called upon to preside at a birth as Sorrow. Nothing in the
world is lost, and wonderful things may sometimes be born of tears.
Reflect that the highest power of will does not manifest itself in the
readiness to choose from many things offered, nor in the firmness which
resists various impulses, but rather in the art of giving the clearness
and dignity of acknowledged and directed powers to the instinctive
motions of nature. Reflect that there is always some way of being equal
to the event in all the chances of this most uncertain life. There was
once a man who, beside a tyrant able by one sign of his hand to condemn
him to death, wore such a look, that bystanders doubted which of the
two was the master. Be thou like unto him, and handle the events of
life in a royal spirit.”
The dome of heaven was tinged with pale hyacinthine blue, and the
olive-trees reflected its calm on their silver locks, which concealed
the painful contortions of their black trunks. The clouds on the rocky
peaks were not yet clothed in purple, but in robes of more delicate
hue, making them droop; yet one here and there raised a proud head
among her companions and aspired to a crown of stars.
“In the meantime compose thy music,” pursued the Dæmon, “out of the
wonderful things which are born of affinity, and of the relations
between three perfect forms contemplated sincerely. In their unison
and surroundings there is a wonderful language which is already as
comprehensible to thee as if thou hadst created it. Out of any one of
their outlines thou canst make the axis of a world. They seem to impart
to thee the joy of continual creation and continual discovery, to
help thee to complete thy harmony with a part of thyself unexpectedly
revealed. They seem to pour into thee again the life which ages ago
they received from thee. Hadst thou not enjoyed them even before they
smiled on thee? As thou stoodest in silence beside them, was not thy
soul within thee heavy as a cloud?”
“Oh despot,” I said, and felt my soul yearn with infinite desire
towards the garden from which the harmonious twilight was bearing me
away. “Oh despot, it is true; as I stood in silence beside them, I
felt stronger emotion than if I had loosed their hair, or pressed my
lips on their beautiful necks, and I am still full of it. Yet, as the
shadows fall, I would fain return there secretly; and invisible to the
eye, I would lean my head on those virginal bosoms and tarry there a
long while, because I think that from those bosoms there would flow
over me in the cool shadow a great sweetness and a great sorrow which I
shall never know.”