LIFE'S NEW LANGUAGE
Two days after they had been cast out of Tetuan, Israel and Naomi were
settled in a little house that stood a day's walk to the north of the
town, about midway between the village of Semsa and the fondak which
lies on the road to Tangier. From the hour wherein the gates had closed
behind them, everything had gone well with both. The country people who
lay encamped on the heath outside had gathered around and shown them
kindness. One old Arab woman, seeing Naomi's shame, had come behind
without a word and cast a blanket over her head and shoulders. Then
a girl of the Berber folk had brought slippers and drawn them on to
Naomi's feet. The woman wore no blanket herself, and the feet of the
girl were bare. Their own people were haggard and hollow-eyed and
hungry, but the hearts of all were melted towards the great man in his
dark hour. “Allah had written it,” they muttered, but they were more
merciful than they thought their God.
Thus, amid silent pity and audible peace-blessings, with cheer of kind
words and comfort of food and drink, Israel and Naomi had wandered on
through the country from village to village, until in the evening, an
hour after sundown, they came upon the hut wherein they made their home.
It was a poor, mean place--neither a round tent, such as the mountain
Berbers build, nor a square cube of white stone, with its garden in a
court within, such as a Moorish farmer rears for his homestead, but an
oblong shed, roofed with rushes and palmetto leaves in the manner of an
Irish cabin. And, indeed, the cabin of an Irish renegade it had been,
who, escaping at Gibraltar from the ship that was taking him to Sidney,
had sailed in a Genoese trader to Ceuta, and made his way across the
land until he came to this lonesome spot near to Semsa. Unlike the
better part of his countrymen, he had been a man of solitary habit and
gloomy temper, and while he lived he had been shunned by his neighbours,
and when he died his house had been left alone. That was the chance
whereby Israel and Naomi had come to possess it, being both poor and
unclaimed.
Nevertheless, though bare enough of most things that man makes and
values, yet the little place was rich in some of the wealth that comes
only from the hand of God. Thus marjoram and jasmine and pinks and roses
grew at the foot of its walls, and it was these sweet flowers which had
first caught the eyes of Israel. For suddenly through the mazes of his
mind, where every perception was indistinct at that time, there seemed
to come back to him a vague and confused recollection of the abandoned
house, as if the thing that his eyes then saw they had surely seen
before. How this should be Israel could not tell, seeing that never
before to his knowledge had he passed on his way to Tangier so near to
Semsa. But when he questioned himself again, it came to him, like light
beaming into a dark room, that not in any waking hour at all had he seen
the little place before, but in a dream of the night when he slept on
the ground in the poor fondak of the Jews at Wazzan.
This, then, was the cottage where he had dreamed that he lived with
Naomi; this was where she had seemed to have eyes to see and ears to
hear and a tongue to speak; this was the vision of his dead wife, which
when he awoke on his journey had appeared to be vainly reflected in
his dream; and now it was realised, it was true, it had come to pass.
Israel's heart was full, and being at that time ready to see the leading
of Heaven in everything, he saw it in this fact also; and thus, without
more ado than such inquiries as were necessary, he settled himself with
Naomi in the place they had chanced upon.
And there, through some months following, from the height of the summer
until the falling of winter, they lived together in peace and content,
lacking much, yet wanting nothing; short of many things that are thought
to make men's condition happy, but grateful and thanking God.
Israel was poor, but not penniless. Out of the wreck of his fortune,
after he sold the best contents of his house, he had still some three
hundred dollars remaining in the pocket of his waistband when he was
cast out of the town. These he laid out in sheep and goats and oxen. He
hired land also of a tenant of the Basha, and sent wool and milk by the
hand of a neighbour to the market at Tetuan. The rains continued, the
eggs of the locust were destroyed, the grass came green out of the
ground, and Israel found bread for both of them. With such simple
husbandry, and in such a home, giving no thought to the morrow, he
passed with cheer and comfort from day to day.
And truly, if at any weaker moment he had been minded to repine for the
loss of his former poor greatness, or to fail of heart in pursuit of
his new calling, for which heavier hands were better fit, he had always
present with him two bulwarks of his purpose and sheet-anchors of his
hope. He was reminded of the one as often as in the daytime he climbed
the hillside above his little dwelling and saw the white town lying far
away under its gauzy canopy of mist, and whenever in the night the town
lamps sent their pale sheet of light into the dark sky.
“They are yonder,” he would think, “wrangling, contending, fighting,
praying, cursing, blessing, and cheating; and I am here, cut off from
them by ten deep miles of darkness, in the quiet, the silence, and sweet
odour of God's proper air.”
But stronger to sustain him than any memory of the ways of his former
life was the recollection of Naomi. God had given back all her gifts,
and what were poverty and hard toil against so great a blessing? They
were as dust, they were as ashes, they were what power of the world and
riches of gold and silver had been without it. And higher than the joy
of Israel's constant remembrance that Naomi had been blind and could now
see, and deaf and could now hear, and dumb and could now speak, was
the solemn thought that all this was but the sign and symbol of God's
pleasure and assurance to his soul that the lot of the scapegoat had
been lifted away.
More satisfying still to the hunger of his heart as a man was his
delicious pleasure in Naomi's new-found life. She was like a creature
born afresh, a radiant and joyful being newly awakened into a world of
strange sights.
But it was not at once that she fell upon this pleasure. What had
happened to her was, after all, a simple thing. Born with cataract on
the pupils of her eyes, the emotion of the moment at the Kasbah, when
her father's life seemed to be once more in danger, had--like a fall
or a blow--luxated the lens and left the pupils clear. That was all.
Throughout the day whereon the last of her great gifts came to her, when
they were cast out of Tetuan, and while they walked hand in hand through
the country until they lit upon their home, she had kept her eyes
steadfastly closed. The light terrified her. It penetrated her delicate
lids, and gave her pain. When for a moment she lifted her lashes and saw
the trees, she put out her hand as if to push them away; and when she
saw the sky, she raised her arms as if to hold it off. Everything seemed
to touch her eyes. The bars of sunlight seemed to smite them. Not until
the falling of darkness did her fears subside and her spirits revive.
Throughout the day that followed she sat constantly in the gloom of the
blackest corner of their hut.
But this was only her baptism of light on coming out of a world of
darkness, just as her fear of the voices of the earth and air had been
her baptism of sound on coming out of a land of silence. Within three
days afterwards her terror began to give place to joy; and from that
time forward the world was full of wonder to her opened eyes. Then
sweet and beautiful, beyond all dreams of fancy, were her amazement and
delight in every little thing that lay about her--the grass, the weeds,
the poorest flower that blew, even the rude implements of the house and
the common stones that worked up through the mould--all old and familiar
to her fingers, but new and strange to her eyes, and marvellous as if an
angel out of heaven had dropped them down to her.
For many days after the coming of her sight she continued to recognise
everything by touch and sound. Thus one morning early in their life in
the cottage, and early also in the day, after Israel had kissed her on
the eyelids to awaken her, and she had opened them and gazed up at him
as he stooped above her, she looked puzzled for an instant, being still
in the mists of sleep, and only when she had closed her eyes again, and
put out her hand to touch him, did her face brighten with recognition
and her lips utter his name. “My father,” she murmured, “my father.”
Thus again, the same day, not an hour afterwards, she came running back
to the house from the grass bank in front of it, holding a flower in her
hand, and asking a world of hot questions concerning it in her broken,
lisping, pretty speech. Why had no one told her that there were flowers
that could see? Here was one which while she looked upon it had opened
its beautiful eye and laughed at her. “What is it?” she asked; “what is
it?”
“A daisy, my child,” Israel answered.
“A daisy!” she cried in bewilderment; and during the short hush and
quick inspiration that followed she closed her eyes and passed her
nervous fingers rapidly over the little ring of sprinkled spears, and
then said very softly, with head aslant as if ashamed, “Oh, yes, so it
is; it is only a daisy.”
But to tell of how those first days of sight sped along for Naomi, with
what delight of ever-fresh surprise, and joy of new wonder, would be a
long task if a beautiful one. They were some miles inside the coast, but
from the little hill-top near at hand they could see it clearly; and one
day when Naomi had gone so far with her father, she drew up suddenly
at his side, and cried in a breathless voice of awe, “The sky! the sky!
Look! It has fallen on to the land.”
“That is the sea, my child,” said Israel.
“The sea!” she cried, and then she closed her eyes and listened, and
then opened them and blushed and said, while her knitted brows smoothed
out and her beautiful face looked aside, “So it is--yes, it is the sea.”
Throughout that day and the night which followed it the eyes of her
mind were entranced by the marvel of that vision, and next morning she
mounted the hill alone, to look upon it again; and, being so far, she
walked farther and yet farther, wandering on and on, through fields
where lavender grew and chamomile blossomed, on and on, as though drawn
by the enchantment of the mighty deep that lay sparkling in the sun,
until at last she came to the head of a deep gully in the coast. Still
the wonder of the waters held her, but another marvel now seized
upon her sight. The gully was a lonesome place inhabited by countless
sea-birds. From high up in the rocks above, and from far down in the
chasm below, from every cleft on every side, they flew out, with white
wings and black ones and grey and blue, and sent their voices into the
air, until the echoing place seemed to shriek and yell with a deafening
clangour.
It was midday when Naomi reached this spot, and she sat there a long
hour in fear and consternation. And when she returned to her father, she
told him awesome stories of demons that lived in thousands by the sea,
and fought in the air and killed each other. “And see!” she cried; “look
at this, and this, and this!”
Then Israel glanced at the wrecks she had brought with her of the
devilish warfare that she had witnessed and “This,” said he, lifting
one of them, “is a sea-bird's feather; and this,” lifting another, “is
a sea-bird's egg; and this,” lifting the third, “is a dead sea-bird
itself.”
Once more Naomi knit her brows in thought, and again she closed her eyes
and touched the familiar things wherein her sight had deceived her.
“Ah yes,” she said meekly, looking into her father's eye, with a smile,
“they are only that after all.” And then she said very quietly, as if
speaking to herself, “What a long time it is before you learn to see!”
It was partly due to the isolation of her upbringing in the company of
Israel that nearly every fresh wonder that encountered her eyes took
shapes of supernatural horror or splendour. One early evening, when she
had remained out of the house until the day was well-nigh done, she came
back in a wild ecstasy to tell of angels that she had just seen in the
sky. They were in robes of crimson and scarlet, their wings blazed like
fire, they swept across the clouds in multitudes, and went down behind
the world together, passing out of the earth through the gates of
heaven.
Israel listened to her and said, “That was the sunset my child. Every
morning the sun rises and every night it sets.”
Then she looked full into his face and blushed. Her shame at her sweet
errors sometimes conquered her joy in the new heritage of sight, and
Israel heard her whisper to herself and say, “After all, the eyes are
deceitful.” Vision was life's new language, and she had yet to learn it.
But not for long was her delight in the beautiful things of the world
to be damped by any thought of herself. Nay, the best and rarest part of
it, the dearest and most delicious throb it brought her, came of herself
alone. On another early day Israel took her to the coast, and pushed off
with her on the waters in a boat. The air was still, the sea was smooth,
the sun was shining, and save for one white scarf of cloud the sky
was blue. They were sailing in a tiny bay that was broken by a little
island, which lay in the midst like a ruby in a ring, covered with
heather and long stalks of seeding grass. Through whispering beds of
rushes they glided on, and floated over banks of coral where gleaming
fishes were at play. Sea-fowl screamed over their heads, as if in anger
at their invasion, and under their oars the moss lay in the shallows on
the pebbles and great stones. It was a morning of God's own making, and,
for joy of its loveliness no less than of her own bounding life, Naomi
rose in the boat and opened her lips and arms to the breeze while it
played with the rippling currents of her hair, as if she would drink and
embrace it.
At that moment a new and dearer wonder came to her, such as every maiden
knows whom God has made beautiful, yet none remembers the hour when she
knew it first. For, tracing with her eyes the shadow of the cliff and of
the continent of cloud that sailed double in two seas of blue to where
they were broken by the dazzling half-round of the sun's reflected disc
on the shadowed quarter of the boat, she leaned over the side of it, and
then saw the reflection of another and lovelier vision.
“Father,” she cried with alarm, “a face in the water! Look! look!”
“It is your own, my child,” said Israel. “Mine!” she cried.
“The reflection of your face,” said Israel; “the light and the water
make it.”
The marvel was hard to understand. There was something ghostly in this
thing that was herself and yet not herself, this face that looked up at
her and laughed and yet made no voice. She leaned back in the boat and
asked Israel if it was still in the water. But when at length she had
grasped the mystery, the artlessness of her joy was charming. She was
like a child in her delight, and like a woman that was still a child
in her unconscious love of her own loveliness. Whenever the boat was at
rest she leaned over its bulwark and gazed down into the blue depths.
“How beautiful!” she cried, “how beautiful!”
She clapped her hands and looked again, and there in the still water
was the wonder of her dancing eyes. “Oh! how very beautiful!” she cried
without lifting her face, and when she saw her lips move as she spoke
and her sunny hair fall about her restless head she laughed and laughed
again with a heart of glee.
Israel looked on for some moments at this sweet picture, and, for all
his sense of the dangers of Naomi's artless joy in her own beauty, he
could not find it in his heart to check her. He had borne too long
the pain and shame of one who was father of an afflicted child to deny
himself this choking rapture of her recovery. “Live on like a child
always, little one,” he thought; “be a child as long as you can, be a
child for ever, my dove, my darling! Never did the world suffer it that
I myself should be a child at all.”
The artlessness of Naomi increased day by day, and found constantly
some new fashion of charming strangeness. All lovely things on the
earth seemed to speak to her, and she could talk with the birds and the
flowers. Also she would lie down in the grass and rest like a lamb, with
as little shame and with a grace as sweet. Not yet had the great mystery
dawned that drops on a girl like an unseen mantle out of the sky, and
when it has covered her she is a child no more. Naomi was a child still.
Nay, she was a child a second time, for while she had been blind she had
seemed for a little while to become a woman in the awful revelation of
her infirmity and isolation. Now she was a weak, patient, blind maiden
no longer, but a reckless spirit of joy once again, a restless gleam of
human sunlight gathering sunshine into her father's house.
It was fit and beautiful that she who had lived so long without the
better part of the gifts of God should enjoy some of them at length
in rare perfection. Her sight was strong and her hearing was keen, but
voice was the gift which she had in abundance. So sweet, so full, so
deep, so soft a voice as Naomi's came to be, Israel thought he had never
heard before. Ruth's voice? Yes, but fraught with inspiration, replete
with sparkling life, and passionate with the notes of a joyous heart.
All day long Naomi used it. She sang as she rose in the morning, and was
still singing when she lay down at night. Wherever people came upon her,
they came first upon the sound of her voice. The farmers heard it across
the fields, and sometimes Israel heard it from over the hill by their
hut. Often she seemed to them like a bird that is hidden in a tree, and
only known to be there by the outbursts of its song.
Fatimah's ditties were still her delight. Some of them fell strangely
from her pure lips, so nearly did they border on the dangerous. But her
favourite song was still her mother's:--
Oh, come and claim thine own,
Oh, come and take thy throne,
Reign ever and alone
Reign glorious, golden Love.
Into these words, as her voice ripened, she seemed to pour a deeper
fervour. She was as innocent as a child of their meaning, but it was
almost as if she were fulfilling in some way a law of her nature as a
maid and drifting blindly towards the dawn of Love. Never did she think
of Love, but it was just as if Love were always thinking of her; it was
even as if the spirit of Love were hovering over her constantly, and she
were walking in the way of its outstretched wings.
Israel saw this, and it set him to chasing day-dreams that were like
the drawing up of a curtain. A beautiful phantom of Naomi's future
would rise up before him. Love had come to her. The great mystery! the
rapture, the blissful wonder, the dear, secret, delicious palpitating
joy. He knew it must come some day--perhaps to day, perhaps to-morrow.
And when it came it would be like a sixth sense.
In quieter moments--generally at night, when he would take a candle and
look at her where she lay asleep--Israel would carry his dreams into
Naomi's future one stage farther, and see her in the first dawn of young
motherhood. Her delicate face of pink an cream; her glance of pride and
joy and yearning, an then the thrill of the little spreading red fingers
fastening on her white bosom--oh, what a glimpse was there revealed to
him!
But struggle as he would to find pleasure in these phantoms, he could
not help but feel pain from them also. They had a perilous fascination
for him, but he grudged them to Naomi. He thought he could have given
his immortal soul to her, but these shadows he could not give. That was
his poor tribute to human selfishness; his last tender, jealous frailty
as a father. He dreaded the coming of that time when another--some other
yet unseen--should come before him, and he should lose the daughter that
was now his own.
Sometimes the memory of their old troubles in Tetuan seemed to cross
like a thundercloud the azure of Naomi's sky, but at the next hour it
was gone. The world was too full of marvels for any enduring sense
but wonder. Once she awoke from sleep in terror, and told Israel of
something which she believed to have happened to her in the night. She
had been carried away from him--she could not say when--and she knew
no more until she found herself in a great patio, paved and wailed with
tiles. Men were standing together there in red peaked caps and flowing
white kaftans. And before them all was one old man in garments that
were of the colour of the afternoon sun, with sleeves like the mouths of
bells, a curling silver knife at his waistband, and little leather bags
hung by yellow cords about his neck. Beside this man there was a woman
of a laughing cruel face; and she herself, Naomi--alone her father being
nowhere near--stood in the midst with all eyes upon her. What happened
next she did not know, for blank darkness fell upon everything, and in
that interval they who had taken her away must have brought her back.
For when she opened her eyes she was in her own bed, and the things of
their little home were about her, and her father's eyes were looking
down at her, and his lips were kissing her, and the sun was shining
outside, and the birds were singing, and the long grass was whispering
in the breeze, and it was the same as if she had been asleep during the
night and was just awakening in the morning.
“It was a dream, my child,” said Israel, thinking only with how vivid
a sense her eyes had gathered up in that instant of first sight the
picture of that day at the Kasbah.
“A dream!” she cried; “no, no! I _saw_ it!”
Hitherto her dreams had been blind ones, and if she dreamt of her own
people it had not been of their faces, but of the touch of their hands
or the sound of their voices. By one of these she had always known them,
and sometimes it had been her mother's arms that had been about her, and
sometimes her father's lips that had pressed her forehead, and sometimes
Ali's voice that had rung in her ears.
Israel smoothed her hair and calmed her fears, but thinking both of her
dream and of her artless sayings, he said in his heart, “She is a child,
a child born into life as a maid, and without the strength of a child's
weakness. Oh! great is the wisdom which orders it so that we come into
the world as babes.”
Thus realising Naomi's childishness, Israel kept close guard and watch
upon her afterwards. But if she was a gleam of sunlight in his lonely
dwelling, like sunlight she came and went in it, and one day he found
her near to the track leading up to the fondak in talk with a passing
traveller by the way, whom he recognised for the grossest profligate out
of Tetuan. Unveiled, unabashed, with sweet looks of confidence she was
gazing full into the man's gross face, answering his evil questions with
the artless simplicity of innocence. At one bound Israel was between
them; and in a moment he had torn Naomi away. And that night, while she
wept out her very heart at the first anger that her father had shown
her, Israel himself, in a new terror of his soul, was pouring out a new
petition to God. “O Lord, my God,” he cried, “when she was blind and
dumb and deaf she was a thing apart, she was a child in no peril from
herself for Thy hand did guide her, and in none from the world, for no
man dared outrage her infirmity. But now she is a maid, and her dangers
are many, for she is beautiful, and the heart of man is evil. Keep me
with her always, O Lord, to guard and guide her! Let me not leave her,
for she is without knowledge of good and evil. Spare me a little
while longer, though I am stricken in years. For her sake spare me, Oh
Lord--it is the last of my prayers--the last, O Lord, the last--for her
sake spare me!”
God did not hear the prayer of Israel. Next morning a guard of soldiers
came out from Tetuan and took him prisoner in the name of the Kaid. The
release of the poor followers of Absalam out of the prison at Shawan had
become known by the blind gratitude of one of them, who, hastening to
Israel's house in the Mellah, had flung himself down on his face before
it.