hands out with a passionate appeal, a yearning gesture, the eloquence of
which should explain all that remained unspoken. He saw their grace and
symmetry, exquisite in the moonlight, then watched them fold together in
an attitude of prayer. Beautiful mother hands they were; hands made to
smooth the pillows of the world, to comfort, bless, caress, hands that
little children everywhere must lean upon and love-perfect symbol of
protective, self-forgetful motherhood.
This tenderness he noted; he noted next--the strength. In the folded
hands he divined the expression of another great world-power, fulfilling
the implacable resolution of the mouth and eyes. He was aware of
relentless purpose, more--of merciless revenge, as by a protective
motherhood outraged beyond endurance. Moreover, the gesture held appeal;
these hands, so close that their actual perfume reached him, sought his
own in help. The power in himself as man, as male, as father--this was
required of him in the fulfillment of the unknown purpose to which this
woman summoned him. His understanding cleared still more.
The couple faced one another, staring fixedly beneath the giant beech
that overarched them. In the dark of his eyes, he knew, lay growing
terror. He shivered, and the shiver passed down his spine, making his
whole body tremble. There stirred in him an excitement he loathed, yet
welcomed, as the primitive male in him, answering the summons, reared up
with instinctive, dreadful glee to shatter the bars that civilization
had so confidently set upon its freedom. A primal emotion of his
under-being, ancient lust that had too long gone hungry and unfed,
leaped towards some possible satisfaction. It was incredible; it was, of
course, a dream. But judgment wavered; increasing terror ate his will
away. Violence and sweetness, relief and degradation, fought in his
soul, as he trembled before a power that now slowly mastered him. This
glee and loathing formed their ghastly partnership. He could have
strangled the woman where she stood. Equally, he could have knelt and
kissed her feet.
The vehemence of the conflict paralysed him.
"A mother's hands ..." he murmured at length, the words escaping like
bubbles that rose to the surface of a seething cauldron and then burst.
And the woman smiled as though she read his mind and saw his little
trembling. The smile crept down from the eyes towards the mouth; he saw
her lips part slightly; he saw her teeth.
But her reply once more transfixed him. Two syllables she uttered in a
voice of iron:
"Louvain."
* * * * *
The sound acted upon him like a Word of Power in some Eastern fairy
tale. It knit the present to a past that he now recognized could never
die. Humanity had _not_ advanced. The hidden source of his secret joy
began to glow. For this woman focused in him passions that life had
hitherto denied, pretending they were atrophied, and the primitive male,
the naked savage rose up, with glee in its lustful eyes and blood upon
its lips. Acquired civilization, a pitiful mockery, split through its
thin veneer and fled.
"Belgian ... Louvain ... Mother ..." he whispered, yet astonished at the
volume of sound that now left his mouth. His voice had a sudden
fullness. It seemed a cave-man roared the words.
She touched his hand, and he knew a sudden intensification of life
within him; immense energy poured through his veins; a mediaeval spirit
used his eyes; great pagan instincts strained and urged against his
heart, against his very muscles. He longed for action.
And he cried aloud: "I am with you, with you to the end!"
Her spell had vivified beyond all possible resistance that primitive
consciousness which is ever the bed-rock of the human animal.
A racial memory, inset against the forest scenery, flashed suddenly
through the depths laid bare. Below a sinking moon dark figures flew in
streaming lines and groups; tormented cries went down the wind; he saw
torn, blasted trees that swayed and rocked; there was a leaping fire, a
gleaming knife, an altar. He saw a sacrifice.
It flashed away and vanished. In its place the woman stood, with shining
eyes fixed on his face, one arm outstretched, one hand upon his flesh.
She shifted slightly, and her cloak swung open. He saw clinging skins
wound closely about her figure; leaves, flowers and trailing green hung
from her shoulders, fluttering down the lines of her triumphant physical
beauty. There was a perfume of wild roses, incense, ivy bloom, whose
subtle intoxication drowned his senses. He saw a sparkling girdle round
the waist, a knife thrust through it tight against the hip. And his
secret joy, the glee, the pleasure of some unlawful and unholy lust
leaped through his blood towards the abandonment of satisfaction.
The moon revealed a glimpse, no more. An instant he saw her thus, half
savage and half sweet, symbol of primitive justice entering the present
through the door of vanished centuries.
The cloak swung back again, the outstretched hand withdrew, but from a
world he knew had altered.
To-day sank out of sight. The moon shone pale with terror and delight on
Yesterday.
7
Across this altered world a faint new sound now reached his ears, as
though a human wail of anguished terror trembled and changed into the
cry of some captured helpless animal. He thought of a wolf apart from
the comfort of its pack, savage yet abject. The despair of a last appeal
was in the sound. It floated past, it died away. The woman moved closer
suddenly.
"All is prepared," she said, in the same low, silvery voice; "we must
not tarry. The equinox is come, the tide of power flows. The sacrifice
is here; we hold him fast. We only awaited you." Her shining eyes were
raised to his. "Your soul is with us now?" she whispered.
"My soul is with you."
"And midnight," she continued, "is at hand. We use, of course, their
methods. Henceforth the gods--their old-world gods--shall work on our
side. They demand a sacrifice, and justice has provided one."
His understanding cleared still more then; the last veil of confusion
was drawing from his mind. The old, old names went thundering through
his consciousness--Odin, Wotan, Moloch--accessible ever to invocation
and worship of the rightful kind. It seemed as natural as though he read
in his pulpit the prayer for rain, or gave out the hymn for those at
sea. That was merely an empty form, whereas this was real. Sea, storm
and earthquake, all natural activities, lay under the direction of those
elemental powers called the gods. Names changed, the principle remained.
"Their weather shall be ours," he cried, with sudden passion, as a
memory of unhallowed usages he had thought erased from life burned in
him; while, stranger still, resentment stirred--revolt--against the
system, against the very deity he had worshipped hitherto. For these had
never once interfered to help the cause of right; their feebleness was
now laid bare before his eyes. And a two-fold lust rose in him.
"Vengeance is ours!" he cried in a louder voice, through which this
sudden loathing of the cross poured hatred. "Vengeance and justice! Now
bind the victim! Bring on the sacrifice!"
"He is already bound." And as the woman moved a little, the curious
erection behind her caught his eye--the piled brushwood he had imagined
was the work of woodmen, picnickers, or playing children. He realized
its true meaning.
It now delighted and appalled him. Awe deepened in him, a wind of ice
passed over him. Civilization made one more fluttering effort. He
gasped, he shivered; he tried to speak. But no words came. A thin cry,
as of a frightened child, escaped him.
"It is the only way," the woman whispered softly. "We steal from them
the power of their own deities." Her head flung back with a marvellous
gesture of grace and power; she stood before him a figure of perfect
womanhood, gentle and tender, yet at the same time alive and cruel with
the passions of an ignorant and savage past. Her folded hands were
clasped, her face turned heavenwards. "I am a mother," she added, with
amazing passion, her eyes glistening in the moonlight with unshed tears.
"We all"--she glanced towards the forest, her voice rising to a wild and
poignant cry--"all, all of us are mothers!"
It was then the final clearing of his understanding happened, and he
realized his own part in what would follow. Yet before the realization
he felt himself not merely ineffective, but powerless. The struggling
forces in him were so evenly matched that paralysis of the will
resulted. His dry lips contrived merely a few words of confused and
feeble protest.
"Me!" he faltered. "My help----?"
"Justice," she answered; and though softly uttered, it was as though the
mediaeval towers clanged their bells. That secret, ghastly joy again rose
in him; admiration, wonder, desire followed instantly. A fugitive memory
of Joan of Arc flashed by, as with armoured wings, upon the moonlight.
Some power similarly heroic, some purpose similarly inflexible, emanated
from this woman, the savour of whose physical enchantment, whose very
breath, rose to his brain like incense. Again he shuddered. The spasm of
secret pleasure shocked him. He sighed. He felt alert, yet stunned.
Her words went down the wind between them:
"You are so weak, you English," he heard her terrible whisper, "so nobly
forgiving, so fine, yet so forgetful. You refuse the weapon _they_ place
within your hands." Her face thrust closer, the great eyes blazed upon
him. "If we would save the children"--the voice rose and fell like
wind--"we must worship where they worship, we must sacrifice to their
savage deities...."
The stream of her words flowed over him with this nightmare magic that
seemed natural, without surprise. He listened, he trembled, and again he
sighed. Yet in his blood there was sudden roaring.
"... Louvain ... the hands of little children ... we have the proof," he
heard, oddly intermingled with another set of words that clamoured
vainly in his brain for utterance; "the diary in his own handwriting,
his gloating pleasure ... the little, innocent hands...."
"Justice is mine!" rang through some fading region of his now fainting
soul, but found no audible utterance.
"... Mist, rain and wind ... the gods of German Weather.... We all ...
are mothers...."
"I will repay," came forth in actual words, yet so low he hardly heard
the sound. But the woman heard.
"_We!_" she cried fiercely, "_we_ will repay!"...
"God!" The voice seemed torn from his throat. "Oh God--_my_ God!"
"_Our_ gods," she said steadily in that tone of iron, "are near. The
sacrifice is ready. And _you_--servant of mercy, priest of a younger
deity, and English--you bring the power that makes it effectual. The
circuit is complete."
It was perhaps the tears in her appealing eyes, perhaps it was her
words, her voice, the wonder of her presence; all combined possibly in
the spell that finally then struck down his will as with a single blow
that paralysed his last resistance. The monstrous, half-legendary spirit
of a primitive day recaptured him completely; he yielded to the spell of
this tender, cruel woman, mother and avenging angel, whom horror and
suffering had flung back upon the practices of uncivilized centuries. A
common desire, a common lust and purpose, degraded both of them. They
understood one another. Dropping back into a gulf of savage worship that
set up idols in the place of God, they prayed to Odin and his awful
crew....
It was again the touch of her hand that galvanized him. She raised him;
he had been kneeling in slavish wonder and admiration at her feet. He
leaped to do the bidding, however terrible, of this woman who was
priestess, queen indeed, of a long-forgotten orgy.
"Vengeance at last!" he cried, in an exultant voice that no longer
frightened him. "Now light the fire! Bring on the sacrifice!"
There was a rustling among the nearer branches, the forest stirred; the
leaves of last year brushed against advancing feet. Yet before he could
turn to see, before even the last words had wholly left his lips, the
woman, whose hand still touched his fingers, suddenly tossed her cloak
aside, and flinging her bare arms about his neck, drew him with
impetuous passion towards her face and kissed him, as with delighted
fury of exultant passion, full upon the mouth. Her body, in its clinging
skins, pressed close against his own; her heat poured into him. She held
him fiercely, savagely, and her burning kiss consumed his modern soul
away with the fire of a primal day.
"The gods have given you to us," she cried, releasing him. "Your soul is
ours!"
She turned--they turned together--to look for one upon whose last hour
the moon now shed her horrid silver.
8
This silvery moonlight fell upon the scene.
Incongruously he remembered the flowers that soon would know the
cuckoo's call; the soft mysterious stars shone down; the woods lay
silent underneath the sky.
An amazing fantasy of dream shot here and there. "I am a man, an
Englishman, a padre!" ran twisting through his mind, as though _she_
whispered them to emphasize the ghastly contrast of reality. A memory of
his own Kentish village with its Sunday school fled past, his dream of
the Lion and the Lamb close after it. He saw children playing on the
green.... He saw their happy little hands....
Justice, punishment, revenge--he could not disentangle them. No longer
did he wish to. The tide of violence was at his lips, quenching an
ancient thirst. He drank. It seemed he could drink forever. These tender
pictures only sweetened horror. That kiss had burned his modern soul
away.
The woman waved her hand; there swept from the underbrush a score of
figures dressed like herself in skins, with leaves and flowers entwined
among their flying hair. He was surrounded in a moment. Upon each face
he noted the same tenderness and terrible resolve that their commander
wore. They pressed about him, dancing with enchanting grace, yet with
full-blooded abandon, across the chequered light and shadow. It was the
brimming energy of their movements that swept him off his feet, waking
the desire for fierce rhythmical expression. His own muscles leaped and
ached; for this energy, it seemed, poured into him from the tossing arms
and legs, the shimmering bodies whence hair and skins flung loose,
setting the very air awhirl. It flowed over into inanimate objects even,
so that the trees waved their branches although no wind stirred--hair,
skins and hands, rushing leaves and flying fingers touched his face, his
neck, his arms and shoulders, catching him away into this orgy of an
ancient, sacrificial ritual. Faces with shining eyes peered into his,
then sped away; grew in a cloud upon the moonlight; sank back in shadow;
reappeared, touched him, whispered, vanished. Silvery limbs gleamed
everywhere. Chanting rose in a wave, to fall away again into forest
rustlings; there were smiles that flashed, then fainted into moonlight,
red lips and gleaming teeth that shone, then faded out. The secret
glade, picked from the heart of the forest by the moon, became a torrent
of tumultuous life, a whirlpool of passionate emotions Time had not
killed.
But it was the eyes that mastered him, for in their yearning, mating so
incongruously with the savage grace--in the eyes shone ever tears. He
was aware of gentle women, of womanhood, of accumulated feminine power
that nothing could withstand, but of feminine power in majesty, its
essential protective tenderness roused, as by tribal instinct, into a
collective fury of implacable revenge. He was, above all, aware of
motherhood--of mothers. And the man, the male, the father in him rose
like a storm to meet it.
From the torrent of voices certain sentences emerged; sometimes chanted,
sometimes driven into his whirling mind as though big whispers thrust
them down his ears. "You are with us to the end," he caught. "We have
the proof. And punishment is ours!"
It merged in wind, others took its place:
"We hold him fast. The old gods wait and listen."
The body of rushing whispers flowed like a storm-wind past.
A lovely face, fluttering close against his own, paused an instant, and
starry eyes gazed into his with a passion of gratitude, dimming a moment
their stern fury with a mother's tenderness: "For the little ones ... it
is necessary, it is the only way.... Our own children...." The face went
out in a gust of blackness, as the chorus rose with a new note of awe
and reverence, and a score of throats uttered in unison a single cry:
"The raven! The White Horses! His signs! Great Odin hears!"
He saw the great dark bird flap slowly across the clearing, and melt
against the shadow of the giant beech; he heard its hoarse, croaking
note; the crowds of heads bowed low before its passage. The White Horses
he did not see; only a sound as of considerable masses of air regularly
displaced was audible far overhead. But the veiled light, as though
great thunder-clouds had risen, he saw distinctly. The sky above the
clearing where he stood, panting and dishevelled, was blocked by a mass
that owned unusual outline. These clouds now topped the forest, hiding
the moon and stars. The flowers went out like nightlights blown. The
wind rose slowly, then with sudden violence. There was a roaring in the
tree-tops. The branches tossed and shook.
"The White Horses!" cried the voices, in a frenzy of adoration. "He is
here!"
It came swiftly, this collective mass; it was both apt and terrible.
There was an immense footstep. It was there.
Then panic seized him, he felt an answering tumult in himself, the Past
surged through him like a sea at flood. Some inner sight, peering across
the wreckage of To-day, perceived an outline that in its size dwarfed
mountains, a pair of monstrous shoulders, a face that rolled through
a full quarter of the heavens. Above the ruin of civilization, now
fulfilled in the microcosm of his own being, the menacing shadow of a
forgotten deity peered down upon the earth, yet upon one detail of it
chiefly--the human group that had been wildly dancing, but that now
chanted in solemn conclave about a forest altar.
For some minutes a dead silence reigned; the pouring winds left
emptiness in which no leaf stirred; there was a hush, a stillness that
could be felt. The kneeling figures stretched forth a level sea of
arms towards the altar; from the lowered heads the hair hung down in
torrents, against which the naked flesh shone white; the skins upon the
rows of backs gleamed yellow. The obscurity deepened overhead. It was
the time of adoration. He knelt as well, arms similarly outstretched,
while the lust of vengeance burned within him.
Then came, across the stillness, the stirring of big wings, a rustling
as the great bird settled in the higher branches of the beech. The
ominous note broke through the silence; and with one accord the shining
backs were straightened. The company rose, swayed, parting into groups
and lines. Two score voices resumed the solemn chant. The throng of
pallid faces passed to and fro like great fire-flies that shone and
vanished. He, too, heard his own voice in unison, while his feet, as
with instinctive knowledge, trod the same measure that the others trod.
Out of this tumult and clearly audible above the chorus and the rustling
feet rang out suddenly, in a sweetly fluting tone, the leader's voice:
"The Fire! But first the hands!"
A rush of figures set instantly towards a thicket where the underbrush
stood densest. Skins, trailing flowers, bare waving arms and tossing
hair swept past on a burst of perfume. It was as though the trees
themselves sped by. And the torrent of voices shook the very air in
answer:
"The Fire! But first--the hands!"
Across this roaring volume pierced then, once again, that wailing sound
which seemed both human and non-human--the anguished cry as of some
lonely wolf in metamorphosis, apart from the collective safety of the
pack, abjectly terrified, feeling the teeth of the final trap, and
knowing the helpless feet within the steel. There was a crash of rending
boughs and tearing branches. There was a tumult in the thicket, though
of brief duration--then silence.
He stood watching, listening, overmastered by a diabolical sensation of
expectancy he knew to be atrocious. Turning in the direction of the cry,
his straining eyes seemed filled with blood; in his temples the pulses
throbbed and hammered audibly. The next second he stiffened into a
stone-like rigidity, as a figure, struggling violently yet half
collapsed, was borne hurriedly past by a score of eager arms that swept
it towards the beech tree, and then proceeded to fasten it in an upright
position against the trunk. It was a man bound tight with thongs,
adorned with leaves and flowers and trailing green. The face was hidden,
for the head sagged forward on the breast, but he saw the arms forced
flat against the giant trunk, held helpless beyond all possible escape;
he saw the knife, poised and aimed by slender, graceful fingers above
the victim's wrists laid bare; he saw the--hands.
"An eye for an eye," he heard, "a tooth for a tooth!" It rose in awful
chorus. Yet this time, although the words roared close about him, they
seemed farther away, as if wind brought them through the crowding trees
from far off.
"Light the fire! Prepare the sacrifice!" came on a following wind; and,
while strange distance held the voices as before, a new faint sound now
audible was very close. There was a crackling. Some ten feet beyond the
tree a column of thick smoke rose in the air; he was aware of heat not
meant for modern purposes; of yellow light that was not the light of
stars.
The figure writhed, and the face swung suddenly sideways. Glaring with
panic hopelessness past the judge and past the hanging knife, the eyes
found his own. There was a pause of perhaps five seconds, but in these
five seconds centuries rolled by. The priest of To-day looked down into
the well of time. For five hundred years he gazed into those twin
eyeballs, glazed with the abject terror of a last appeal. They
recognized one another.
The centuries dragged appallingly. The drama of civilization, in a
sluggish stream, went slowly by, halting, meandering, losing itself,
then reappearing. Sharpest pains, as of a thousand knives, accompanied
its dreadful, endless lethargy. Its million hesitations made him suffer
a million deaths of agony. Terror, despair and anger, all futile and
without effect upon its progress, destroyed a thousand times his soul,
which yet some hope--a towering, indestructible hope--a thousand times
renewed. This despair and hope alternately broke his being, ever to
fashion it anew. His torture seemed not of this world. Yet hope
survived. The sluggish stream moved onward, forward....
There came an instant of sharpest, dislocating torture. The yellow light
grew slightly brighter. He saw the eyelids flicker.
It was at this moment he realized abruptly that he stood alone, apart
from the others, unnoticed apparently, perhaps forgotten; his feet held
steady; his voice no longer sang. And at this discovery a quivering
shock ran through his being, as though the will were suddenly loosened
into a new activity, yet an activity that halted between two terrifying
alternatives.
It was as though the flicker of those eyelids loosed a spring.
Two instincts, clashing in his being, fought furiously for the mastery.
One, ancient as this sacrifice, savage as the legendary figure brooding
in the heavens above him, battled fiercely with another, acquired
more recently in human evolution, that had not yet crystallized into
permanence. He saw a child, playing in a Kentish orchard with toys and
flowers the little innocent hands made living ... he saw a lowly manger,
figures kneeling round it, and one star shining overhead in piercing and
prophetic beauty.
Thought was impossible; he saw these symbols only, as the two contrary
instincts, alternately hidden and revealed, fought for permanent
possession of his soul. Each strove to dominate him; it seemed that
violent blows were struck that wounded physically; he was bruised, he
ached, he gasped for breath; his body swayed, held upright only, it
seemed, by the awful appeal in the fixed and staring eyes.
The challenge had come at last to final action; the conqueror, he well
knew, would remain an integral portion of his character, his soul.