stars, were by now decreasing. The wind blowing through the windows and
doors was stronger and cooler, the impenetrable darkness beyond the
door surged more loudly. A large sea-shell that served as an ash-tray
was sliding upon the table. Under one’s feet, growing unpleasantly
weaker, one felt something gathering force below, lifting one up, then
falling over on one side, spreading out,--and the floor fell deeper
and deeper from under one’s feet. The ship’s men, having finished
their coffee and smoked their fill, sat in silence for several minutes
more, casting glances at their queer passenger; then, wishing him
good-night, they began picking up their caps. The captain alone stayed
on,--he was smoking and following the Englishman with his eyes. The
Englishman, with a cigar, was walking, swayingly, from door to door;
his dark complexion, his spectacles, and his seriousness combined with
absent-mindedness, irritated the old steward, who was clearing the
table.
“Yes, yes,” said the Englishman, “there is only one thing frightful
to us,--that we have forgotten how to feel fear! There is no God, no
religion in Europe, long since; we, with all our business activity and
greed, are as cold as ice both toward life and toward death. Even if
we do fear death, it is with our reason or only with the remnants of
an animal instinct. At times we even try to inspire ourself with that
dread, to exaggerate it,--and still we do not respond, do not feel in
due measure those incomprehensible and horrible things of which the
life of man is full.... Just as I, even I, do not now feel that which
I myself have called fearful,” said he, pointing toward the open door,
beyond which the impenetrable darkness murmured, by now raising high
the prow, and tumbling the ship, all of whose partitions were creaking,
from one side to the other.
“It is Ceylon that has affected you so,” said the captain mechanically.
“Oh, beyond a doubt, beyond a doubt!” agreed the Englishman. “We
all,--commercial men, mechanical engineers, military men, politicians,
colonizers,--we all, fleeing from our own dullness and vanity,
wander all the world over; for you will agree that the number of
travelling Europeans is increasing with a magic rapidity; that the
entire terrestrial globe is plastered over with motley placards and
time-tables. And we try with all our might to be enraptured, now with
the mountains and lakes of Switzerland, now with the pauperism of
Italy,--her pictures and the broken-up fragments of her statues and
columns. Or we wander over the slippery stones which have survived from
some amphitheatres in Sicily, or we gaze with simulated delight upon
the yellow heaps of rubble at the Acropolis in Greece; or attend, as
though it were some show-booth spectacle at a fair, the distribution
of the sacred fire in Jerusalem. We pay sums unheard of in order
to undergo tortures from guides and fleas in the tombs and clay
idol-temples of Egypt. We sail to India, to China, to Japan,--and it
is only here, upon the soil of the most ancient of mankind, in this
Eden which we have forfeited, which we style our colonies and which we
covetously despoil, in the midst of squalor, bubonic plague, cholera,
fevers, and coloured races whom we have turned into cattle,--only
here do we feel, in some slight measure, life, death, godhood. Here,
after having remained indifferent toward all these Osirises, Zeuses,
Appolons, toward Christ, toward Mahomet, have I more than once felt
that I might perhaps have bowed only before them,--these fearful
Gods of this cradle of mankind: before the hundred-armed Brahma;
before Siva; before the Devil; before Buddha, whose word verily rang
forth like the utterance of Methuselah himself, driving nails into
the coffin-lid of the universe.... Yes, thanks only to the East, and
to the diseases contracted in the East; thanks to the fact that in
Africa I slaughtered men by the hundreds; that in India, which is
being despoiled by England, and, therefore, in part by me, I have seen
thousands dying from hunger; that I had bought little girls in Japan to
be my wives for a month; that in China I had beaten defenseless, simian
old men over their heads with a stick; that in Java and Ceylon I had
driven rickshaw-men until I heard the death rattle in their throats;
that I had, in my time, contracted a most cruel fever in Anaradhapore,
and liver trouble on the shore of Malabar,--only thanks to all this do
I still feel and think, after a fashion. Those lands, those countless
peoples, which still either live a life of infantile immediacy,
sentient with all their beings of existence, and death, and the
divine majesty of the universe; or those lands and peoples which have
already traversed a long and arduous path (historical, religious and
philosophical), and who have grown wearied on this path,--such lands
and peoples we, the men of the new age of iron, aspire to enslave, to
divide amongst us, and this we style our colonial problems. And when
this division shall come to an end, then on this world will again be
enthroned the might of some new Tyre or Sidon, a new Rome, English or
German. There will be repeated, inevitably repeated, also that which
had been prophesied by Judæan prophets to Sidon, that, according to
the word of the Bible, had grown to deem itself God; that which had
been prophesied to Rome by the Apocalypse; and to India, to the Aryan
tribes that had enslaved it, by Buddha, who has said, ‘O ye princes,
ye men in power, rich in treasures, who have arrayed your covetousness
against one another, insatiably pandering to your lusts! ...’ Buddha
understood the significance of the life of Individuality in this ‘world
of having been,’ in this universe, whose meaning we cannot attain
to, and he was horrified with a sacred horror. Whereas we exalt our
Individuality above the heavens; we want to centre all the world within
it, no matter what may be said of the coming universal brotherhood and
equality. And so it is only on the ocean, under stars new and foreign
to us, in the midst of the majesty of tropical thunder storms; or in
India, in Ceylon, where history is so immeasurable, where at times one
glimpses life veritably primitive, and where on dark, sultry nights,
in the fevered gloom, one feels man melting, dissolving in this
blackness, in these sounds, scents, in this fearful All-Oneness,--only
there do we in a slight measure grasp the meaning of this our pitiful
Individuality.... Do you know,” said he, halting again, and flashing
his spectacles at the captain, “a certain Buddhistic legend?”
“Which one?” asked the captain, who had already yawned surreptitiously
and had glanced at his watch.
“Why, this: A raven darted after an elephant who was running down
a wooded mountain toward the sea; wrecking all things in his path,
breaking down the overgrowths, the elephant plunged into the
waves,--and the raven, tortured by ‘desire,’ fell after him, and,
having waited until the elephant had swallowed enough water to kill
himself and had floated up on the waves, descended on the carcass with
its great ears; the carcass floated on, putrefying, while the raven
greedily pecked away at it; but when he came to his senses, he saw that
he had been borne far, far from land,--to a distance from which there
is no return even upon the wings of a gull,--and he began cawing in a
piteous voice, that voice for which Death waits so warily.... It is a
terrible legend!”
“Yes, it is very significant,” said the captain, indifferently.
The Englishman lapsed into silence and again began pacing from door to
door. From the surging darkness faintly floated in the sounds of the
second bell, abrupt and, as is always the case on the ocean, plaintive.
The captain, after having sat for five minutes more out of politeness,
got up, shook the Englishman’s hand, and went off to his big, restful
cabin. The Englishman, reflecting upon something, continued pacing. The
steward, having endured for half an hour more in the pantry, entered
and with an angry face began switching off the electricity, leaving
only one bulb lit. The Englishman, when the steward had disappeared,
walked up to the wall and turned off this bulb as well. Darkness
descended at once, the surging of the waves at once appeared louder,
and the starry sky, the masts, the sail-yards at once appeared in
the open windows. The steamer creaked and clambered from one watery
mountain to another. It swung wider and wider, rising and falling,--and
in its rigging Canopus, the Crow, the Southern Cross swayed widely to
and fro, now flying toward the abyss above, now toward the abyss below,
and roseate auroras were still flashing above them.
_1914._
GAUTAMI
This is a tale thrice beautiful in its brevity and unpretentiousness,
its meaning and the manner of its telling; a tale of the love of
Gautami, the saintly and the beatified, who, without knowing it
herself, did come under the sheltering shadow of the Blessed One.
Thus have we heard it told:
In a populous hamlet, in a felicitous region, at the foot of the great
Himalayas, in a family poor but worthy, was Gautami born.
She was tall of stature and rather lean at first sight; swarthy
and pleasant of face was she, and simple and unpretentious of
soul,--therefore did the neighbours bestow an unkind by-name upon her.
“Gautami the Lean” did they nickname her, but she took no offense
thereat. And every order did she obey, and to every order she made such
answer as:
“’Tis well, dear master; I shall do so. ’Tis well, dear mistress, I
shall do so.”
For may plain speech be forgiven us,--not of the wisest among men and
women was Gautami. But neither did she utter anything foolish,--perhaps
because she did not say much, and laboured at something from morning
till night. And the raiment upon her was always poor, and always,
always the same, but always neat. And so one day a youth, truly rich
and handsome, the son of the great king of that region, did behold her
upon a river bank, when she was washing the linen of her sisters and
brothers, and he comprehended that she was sensible and submissive, and
that there was none to take her part,--not even her parents.
Thus did he think:
“‘There is no help for it,’ her parents will say; ‘Gautami is not of
the wisest, Gautami is not pretty to look upon; she does not resemble
a daughter of ours, but rather a servant,--who shall take her to wife?
Sooner or later, she shall submit to some man who may desire her,--for
Gautami is incapable of refusing. Ah, if only this man prove not
without pity, and will give away, to be rightly brought up, the child
that will be born of her!’”
Thus did the king’s son think.
As for Gautami, having washed and rinsed the linen, she squatted down
upon her heels over the water glistening in the sun; having taken off
all her raiment, she did swathe all her body from the arm-pits to the
knees in an old piece of cloth, and, having spread her long black hair,
began to clean her white teeth with a wetted, splintered little stick,
began to wash her swarthy limbs, not knowing that the king’s son was
watching her from behind the clumps of bamboo. And thereupon he did
call out to her, and, walking up to her, told her with a smile, yet not
unkindly:
“Thou art endearing, Gautami, and not at all as lean as they say you
are,--a maid clad in simple raiment, and of tall stature, is often
misjudged. I have heard, Gautami, that thou art submissive. Do not
resist me, therefore; none shall see our caresses at this sultry hour,
near the deserted river.”
And Gautami was abashed before him, before his assurances that his
wishes were righteous, and she did whisper in answer:
“’Tis well, dear master; let it be as thou dost will.”
And the king’s son, having had his joyance of her, saw that she was
better than she had seemed, and that her dark eyes, although they were
not expressive of thought, and somehow seemed always the same, were
never the less full of enchantment. And after that their meetings upon
the bank of the river, within the grove of bamboos, became frequent,
and so it was that, whenever the king’s son would order Gautami to
come to him, she always would come, never disobeying; nor did her
submissiveness and charm change with the intimacy of their bodies; nor
her agreeable manner when their conversation was brief. And when the
ordained time had run, she felt herself heavy with child.
Thereupon did the king’s son take her as one of his concubines,
transferring her with her poor little kit, wherein she kept her modest
belongings, the sorry savings of a maiden who works, into his opulent
palace, and she lived in the palace until her time was come.
And when her day had approached, one of the king’s stewardesses did say
to her:
“Gautami! A wife who is about to become a mother goeth to the house of
her father to give birth, in fulfillment of the custom. But thou art no
wife, but a concubine. Go not therefore to the house of thy parents;
but also do not thou transgress against that which is seemly.”
And Gautami, having salaamed before her, got up, and went out of the
gate of the clay walls that enclosed the palace.
And, having passed over the wooden bridge that spanned a muddy canal,
which was near by, she saw one who sat under a tree, with a bowl in his
hand,--a blind and an ancient beggar, girt only about his middle with
a dirty rag, whereas his arms, his legs, his bosom and his withered,
glistening back he had exposed to the blazing sun and the flies.
And the beggar raised his sightless face, hearkening to her steps, and
he smiled with the tender and poignant smile of the wisdom of old men.
“Gautami!” spake he to her. “I see thee not but I feel thy approach.
Gautami, may thy path be blessed!”
And she kissed the knee of the beggar and went on upon her way; and
upon her way, in the hot, sun-filled groves, among the satin trees, she
did give birth to her child before its time.
And blissfully, having rested with tears of happiness after her sore
travail, she returned with the child in her arms into the palace of the
prince and gave full rein to her ceaseless ecstasy and tender delight,
to an emotion of bodily love for the new-born, to the delectable
disquiet of seeing, scenting, touching, and pressing to her bosom
this growing being, that with every day became more and more awake to
thought and consciousness.
“My soul hath recalled thee!”--these words had not been uttered by the
prince to Gautami when he had become as one with her, even though she
had been dear to him, even though they had borne her to the palace of
the king with music, upon bullocks adorned with ribbands and flowers,
having arrayed her as for a bridal, dressing her black hair smoothly,
putting rouge on her cheeks, and blackening her eye-lashes with kohl.
And Gautami, having given birth to the child, received submissively
the youth’s having grown cold toward her, and removed herself from his
sight, that he might not feel troubled and guilty upon meeting her by
chance.
And, remaining within the enclosure of the palace, she settled in a
simple hut on the banks of the ponds, taking upon herself the duty
of feeding the swans that swam in those ponds among the grasses and
flowers.
And for a time she was happy, preparing, without herself knowing
it, for those great sorrows which were destined to come in ordained
replacement of this happiness, and to put her upon the sole true path,
into the society of the religious brotherhood of those that go clad in
yellow.
Blessed are the meek at heart, who have riven their chain.
In an abode of the highest joy do we dwell, who love nothing in this
universe, and like to a bird are we, that beareth nothing with it but
its wings.
_1919._
THE SON
Mme. Marot had been born and had grown up in Lausanne, in a strict,
honest, and industrious family. She did not marry early, but when she
did, hers was a love match. In the March of 1876, among the passengers
of the old French steamer _Auvergne_, sailing from Marseilles to
Italy, was a newly married couple. The days were calm, cool; the sea,
all silvery mirrors, lost itself in the misty spring distances; the
newly-married couple scarcely ever left the deck. And all admired them,
all beheld their happiness with amiable smiles: he showed his happiness
in an alert, keen glance, in the necessity for motion, in an animated
amiability to all those around him; she, by that joyous interest, with
which she assimilated every trifle.... This newly married pair was the
Marots.
He was some ten years her senior; he was short in height, swarthy of
face, with curly hair; his hand was thin, and his voice sonorous. But
in her one sensed an admixture of some blood other than that of the
Latins. She seemed just the least trifle too tall, although her waist
was splendid; though her hair was dark, her eyes were a grayish blue.
They travelled through Naples, Palermo and Tunis to the Algerian town
of Constantine, where Monsieur Marot had obtained a rather prominent
appointment. And life in Constantine those fourteen years which had
passed since that happy spring, had given them everything with which
people are usually content: a competance, domestic harmony, healthy and
handsome children.
During these fourteen years the Marots had changed very much in
appearance: his face had become as black as an Arab’s, he had grown
gray and dried up from work, from travelling, from tobacco, and from
the sun,--many took him for a native of Algeria; nor would any one have
recognized her as the woman who had been a passenger upon the steamer
_Auvergne_: then, even in the shoes she put outside the door at night,
there had been the enchantment of youth; now she too had glints of
silver in her hair, her skin had grown finer and more aureate, her
hands had become thinner, and in her care of them, in the dressing of
her hair, in her linen, in her apparel, she already betrayed a certain
superfluous nicety. Their relations had changed as well, of course,
although none would have said that it was for the worse. And each one
led an individual existence: his time was taken up with work,--he still
remained as passionate, and, at the same time, as sober a man as he had
been before; she had to take care of him, of the children--two very
pretty girls, of whom the elder was by now almost a young lady,--and
everybody unanimously declared that there was not in all Constantine a
better housekeeper, a better mother, or a more charming person to chat
with in a drawing room, than Mme. Marot.
Their house stood on a quiet and clean street. From the second story,
out of the front rooms, always in semi-darkness on account of the
closed Venetian blinds, could be seen Constantine, famed all over the
world for its picturesqueness: this ancient Arabian stronghold, which
had become a French city, lies upon sloping crags. The windows of
the living rooms, shady and cool, looked out upon the garden,--there,
in a perpetual blaze and glare, dozed age-old eucalypti, sycamores,
palms, behind their enclosures of high walls. The master of the house
frequently absented himself on matters connected with his work. As
for the mistress, she led that confined existence to which, in the
colonies, the wives of all Europeans are condemned. On Sundays she
invariably attended church. On week days she rarely went out and
restricted herself to a small, choice circle. She read, busied herself
with embroidery, chatted with the children or took part in their
lessons; sometimes, putting the dark-eyed Marie, her younger daughter,
on her knees, and playing on the pianoforte with one hand, she would
sing old-fashioned French songs, to make the long African day seem
shorter, while the hot wind entered in a flood from the garden through
the wide-open windows.... Constantine, under the pitiless blaze of the
sun and with all its shutters closed, seemed at these hours a dead
city: only the roller-birds called out behind the walls of the gardens,
and plaintively, with the nostalgia of colonial lands, sounded the
trumpets of the buglers on the knolls beyond the city, where at times
the cannons made the earth shake with a dull rumble, and one saw the
white helmets of the soldiers twinkling.
The days in Constantine passed monotonously, but no one ever remarked
that Mme. Marot was oppressed by this. In her character, exquisite and
chaste, never appeared any heightened sensitiveness, nor any surplus
nervousness. Her health could not be called robust, but it never caused
any alarm to Monsieur Marot. Only one incident had struck him: once,
in Tunis, an Arab magician had put her so rapidly into a profound
sleep, that she had great difficulty in coming back to herself. But
this had been still at the time of their journey from France; since
that time she had not experienced any such sharp declines of will
power, any such unwholesome susceptibility. And Monsieur Marot was
happy, tranquil, and convinced that her soul was undisturbed and like
an open book to him. And so it really was, even during the last--the
fourteenth--year of his domestic life.... But now there appeared in
Constantine a certain Emile du Buys.
Emile du Buys, son of Mme. Bonnet, an old and close friend of the
Marots, was only nineteen years of age. Mme. Bonnet, the widow of an
engineer, had also a daughter, Eliza, besides Emile, who was born of
the first marriage. He had grown up in Paris and was already reading
law; but, above all, he was taken up with the composition of verses
which were comprehensible to him alone, and had attached himself to
a non-existent school of poetry, “The Seekers.” In the May of 1889
Eliza was preparing for the altar, but took sick and died a few days
after. Emile, who had never up to now been in Constantine, had come
for the funeral. It is easy to understand how touched Mme. Marot
was by this death,--this death of a girl who was already trying on
the bridal veil; everyone also knows how under such circumstances
intimacy is established even between people who have scarce come to
know one another. In addition, Emile was in reality only a boy to Mme.
Marot. Shortly after the funeral, Mme. Bonnet went to France, to her
relatives. Emile remained in Constantine, at the suburban county house
of his late stepfather,--at the Villa Hassim, as it was called in the
town,--and began to visit the Marots almost daily. No matter what sort
of a chap he may have been, or whatever he may have pretended to be, he
was, never the less, very young, very sensitive, and had need of people
with whom he might seek shelter for a time. “And isn’t it strange,”
said some, “Mme. Marot has become unrecognizable! How animated she has
become; how she has improved in looks!”
However, these allusions were unfounded. At first all it amounted to
was that her existence became a trifle gayer, and that her girls became
more playful and coquettish, for Emile, every minute forgetting his
grief and that virus with which, as he thought, the _fin de siècle_
had envenomed him, fussed for hours at a time with them, altogether
as their equal. Of course he was, after all, a man, a Parisian, and
not altogether of an ordinary nature; he had participated in that
life which Parisian writers lead, so inaccessible to common mortals;
frequently, with a certain somnambulistic expressiveness, he would read
strange but sonorous verses; and, perhaps, it was precisely thanks to
him that the step of Mme. Marot became lighter and quicker, her house
apparel just the least trifle smarter, and the nuances of her voice
kindlier and more mocking; there may have been, after all, a drop of
purely feminine joy in her soul over the fact that here was a man whom
it was possible to lord it over somewhat, with whom it was possible
to speak with a half jesting sententiousness, with that freedom which
was so naturally permitted by the difference in their years. And also
over the fact that here was one who was so devoted to her entire
household,--where, however, the first person for him (this, of course
was revealed very quickly) was still none other than she. But then, how
commonplace all this is! Yet for the most part he was merely pitiful to
her.