nervousness on behalf of his own soul. Religion often confuses a woman
with her own halo. She asked him delightfully what could hold him back
from Christianity, or why she might not smooth away any particular
difficulty. He smiled his catlike smile and asked: “You say that Allah
childed by Miriam the Virgin?” Theodosia nodded. “And the Child was
God?” Another nod. “Then the Only God became many Gods?” “Only two!”
she threw in a little hastily, for he sharply rapped: “And the Holy
Ghost, of whom you were speaking yesterday?” “Yes, the Holy Ghost also
is God,” she admitted, “but no others.” “Allah is become three Gods
then,” he said, and spoke no more. Sometimes she would have persuaded
him that the Son also was God and the Holy Ghost, God, but he stroked
her and soothed her enthusiasm with Oriental calm. “I would find it far
easier to believe that Miriam the Virgin is God,” he said one evening.
“Gracious!” quoth the daughter of the Manse, “do not become a Roman
Catholic, whatever you do.” He laughed. “You have so many different
Churches among the Christians, and so many Gods, that I cannot discern
which is right.” Yet he always seemed to be laying his difficulties
at her feet, when he lowered his head on her shoulder. She showed no
repulsion, which was to him astonishing. Never had he met white woman
the like. “Women are to me religion,” he continued. “The great prophets
have made it a choice between women and religion. I have found that
they are the same.” She did not quite understand his meaning, but she
quickly composed the only meaning attachable to his words in their
circumstances. He must be fond of her and, because he was fond of her,
he must want to become a Christian, she assumed. She looked round into
the high-bred dusky face on her shoulder and without moving her lips
touched his with her mouth. She intended it as a friendly little act of
gratitude, as though she were stroking the nice old tame tiger behind
bars in the Dublin Zoo. At most he might have purred. The effect on
the Prince was, however, different. He tossed his lighted cigar into
the sea like a tiny redheaded rocket. Then he caught her mouth between
his lips and drew it slowly into his, while his arms crept round her
body, and his ring-jewelled claws spread themselves on her chest like
a panther holding its surprised prey. She saw his face slowly rise
from hers, and in the dark his feline teeth flashed with tiny but
exquisitely set diamonds. She kept quite cool, though dimly realising
how romantic a Governess she would be expected to be.
* * * * *
In Persia Theodosia came into her fairy own. Geographically she knew
not where she was, within hundreds of miles. She had been brought
inland by native bearers, had been carried in litters, with her
baby, and finally thrown amongst the ladies of the harem. There
she had been clothed in Eastern dress and looked to herself like a
perpetual Christmas card. She was strangely remote from any idea of a
Presbyterian missionary. Her feet, cased in rich-smelling morocco, were
no longer the elastic-sided feet of those who bring good tidings upon
the mountain-tops. The dusty, rusty dresses of the Jumble Sale were
no more. The thread-worn skirts were replaced with something more in
accordance with the surrounding Jungle. Her mother’s black jet brooch
had been destroyed or lost by the Prince, who gave her pearls instead.
She wore them for his pleasure, half stripping herself at night in
order to keep cool--pearls in long strings, falling festoons, white
waves of pearls. He liked to watch her concealing her modesty behind
their dangling sheen, and she would lie back like a flower which has
weathered long vernal frosts and is bursting bud more brightly for the
delay. In that tropical Asian summer she bloomed like a flower of the
Irish spring. And her hair was in perpetual flower, summer or winter,
with its strange and indescribable coloration, milk of dandelion,
cream of marigold or quintessence of honey. It gave the Prince a queer
religious exaltation.
Theodosia did not fail to fall in love with her lover. It had all come
with such a rush. Not until she was ensconced in his harem did she
realise that he intended her to occupy the position of a favourite
wife, and that even among the dark ladies she was favourite, and that
his holy favour was upon her. In the Palace and the Palace gardens she
was accounted something divine. Servants fell prostrate before her.
Days of wonderful ease and luxury followed. Weird sights and colours
came to her through slitted shutters. Theodosia was clothed in Oriental
dress by silent slaves every morning, though when she dined with her
Prince a vitiation of taste insisted on Parisian gowns. He was really
a dazzling creature, not handsome but forceful and intoxicating in his
converse and behaviour. Gorgeous was his dress, taken clean out of
the “Arabian Nights,” though at moments he wore beautifully tailored
London suits, which Theodosia used to mistake for the first signs of
Christian disposition. She had given up the attempt to convert him.
He always listened with agreeable politeness and then countered with
something too unexpected or upsetting for words. Indulgently he would
hear what were to him the utterly preposterous doctrines of Irish
Presbyterianism, and then quietly inquire how any Prophet, however
well spoken of in Belfast, could be the bodily son of Allah. Or he
would quote cleverly from the Scriptures and the Koran until she was so
muddled that she knew not which he was drawing argument from. And when
challenged on a doctrine she would coyly refer to John Knox or John
Calvin, and once she referred to her father’s great hero, Dr. Hanna of
Belfast, and the Prince asked if Hanna was a lady preacher, and laughed
her to scorn.
When she had had her little say, he would read her ecstatic words from
the Song of Solomon and give her coffee filled with a sharp-sweet
little flavouring, and then she would forget everything except his
marvellous love-making. To the subtleties and ecstasies of love she had
always remained a stranger. She had known nothing more intoxicating
than her own desire, and that she had achieved. Josiah had always
treated her with Presbyterian primness, wooing her with perfectly
wooden propriety. Her ecstasy of Josiah’s embrace lay in release from
home. When home dwindled into hemi-spheral distances, the ecstasy of
Josiah ceased. He was a dull lover, in other words a perfect husband,
and he retained a certain prosaic modesty of courtship by his total
absence of any poetry of motive or motion. On occasions of connubial
felicity he never did more than read her a chapter from the Epistles of
St. Paul. The difference between St. Paul and Solomon was considerable.
The Prince remembered the word of the Prophet, whose blood ran in his
tropical veins, and how Mohammed had said to every faithful, “Woman is
thy field, plough her after thy will.” And he made love to Theodosia,
to all her emotion and to all her soul, and with his body did worship
and with his soul did adore her until she would swoon in his arms, and
only awake from swoon to become sufficiently and sweetly conscious
that she was swooning again. Often an Asiatic moon looked through the
forests and gardens and lighted on her beautiful primrose hair as it
lay in wet wythes across the hot mouth of His High Serenity and Holy
Highness, who was graciously pleased for the moment to forget his
race-horses in France and his chorus girls in England, and even the
Exalted Star of India, which he had received during his last visit to
Calcutta. For her part, Theodosia awoke to all that he roused in her.
Whithersoever he called, she followed him even in a dream. Surely he
had never known white woman like her, for she was the first to respond
to his love and not to his pearls. And she satisfied his soul as well
as his body. He found something strange and almost uncanny in her
hidden beauty and unconscious charm. She came to exercise a magical
effect on him, and when he remembered how she had come to him out
of the seas, like Aphrodite through the foam, she became poetry and
passion, a veritable goddess in his eye. Her sway and power became
tantamount in the seraglio and, had she cared, supreme through the
Palace and through the dominions of the Prince.
It was so strange, in his eyes, that she never asked him a favour
and even gave him back the jewels with which he delighted to heap her
sinuous body. Through unguents and the fingers of her attendants she
had acquired a grace and dexterity for which her health and simplicity
of life had prepared the way. When she lay sleeping she lay like a
white snake that had just sloughed its scales, firm and warm and
rippling. The Prince was appreciative of the gifts of Allah and felt
frequently grateful that he was of the kindred of the Prophet.
It was true that he was often criticised in the Orient for his
excessive love of things European, of English clothes, white women
and French luxuries, but it was never dreamed or hinted that he could
betray the faith of Islam. Astuteness as well as piety combined to keep
him steady on that point. With the European Governments he was on the
best of terms. His subtle religious influence was always thrown on the
side of the English Raj, and a letter from his pen was always accorded
special attention whenever he deigned to point out some unnoticed
excellence of English rule or to convey some sentiment of the East to
her understanding rulers. Though excluded from certain clubs, he stood
socially very high in Europe.
Nevertheless there were movements abroad in Asia, and the ways of the
Prince were not well seen by the Nationalists and devotees of Asiatic
Bolshevism, and he was freely criticised and even cursed among many who
should have been his followers. He had the misfortune to be equally
distasteful to students with European culture, who applied a knowledge
of the Higher Mathematics and chemistry to bomb manufacture in the
East, and to the fanatics, who hated him for the horrible rumour that
he had introduced a white missionary woman into his household.
But no rumour reached Theodosia, who was lulled to ease and at moments
lifted to ecstasy, until she forgot her father and her father’s Kirk.
The strictness that had been bred into her with a ramrod lapsed. She
gave herself up to her lover until she could hardly bear to pass a day
or a night without him. The sound of revolution and uprising never
reached her. She never read apprehension on his strained features or
realised that he loved her every hour as though it might be their
last. She loved him each time as though it were the first. It was her
perennial spirit. They were great and wonderful lovers, that was all.
* * * * *
The end was bound to come and it came. A day broke with ominous quiet
over the Palace. The Prince had departed that morning on business
of state for many days. He was travelling on his way to India. His
secretary had just telegraphed the number of guns that the station
master and the British Government were expected to provide, also
the height and trappings necessary for the elephants privileged to
carry his baggage and the holy bath water.... An hour or two passed
of perfect calm.... Then a low wail arose outside the Palace and a
frightened woman crept into the women’s quarters, spreading word that
the holy one, the beloved of the Prophet, had been assassinated at the
railway station. A moan swept through the harem like a subconscious sob
of Suttee, as though every woman that had ever lain in his arms was
turning her face to the wall to die. Slaves threw themselves on the
ground and tore out their hair, mourning their dead lord with pitiful
and heart-lacerating sounds. From outside the Palace rolled the rumble
of confusion and disaster. Cries and occasional shots pierced the still
of the afternoon air.
Theodosia, much astonied, felt neither grief nor fear. She had loved
him as she could never love a husband or one of her own race. He was a
vivid unreality, a weird monster, who came to her in dream, half Cupid
and half Caliban, but he had appealed to the fairy part of her nature,
and he had raped her soul till she felt there was none left. Therefore
she sat without regrets and without remorse carelessly waiting what
might come. As the shouts outside grew fiercer, women were thrown into
hysterics of fear and grief.
Nobody knew now what might come. Theodosia was the only one who might
have been expected to feel some tremor, to show some fear, for within
her moved the child of the Prince. She kept her mind unstricken within
herself that the child might not be frightened in the womb or released
before the hour. Something stronger than herself upheld her. An
immortal mood lifted her above the accidents of Oriental revolution.
She was not overmatched by circumstances nor overthrown by approaching
fate. She did not trouble to imagine the future in which she lived or
died. She sat there vacant-minded with full body and high heart in that
Palace of mourning and terrified despair. More than ever before in her
life she knew that she was not of those around her. The mysterious
sense of power and isolation drew her apart, which had once drawn her
apart from her family in Ireland. During another hour fell expectancy
hung over all. At last came knocks, cries and repeated inquiry. The
guards had left their post so that the fanatics were able to enter
without a word. The revolutionary students had settled the fate of the
Prince at the railway station. It remained for the strict reactionaries
to carry out a visitation of the harem.
The infidel wife of the favoured child of the Prophet had long been a
ribald rumour upon the lips of their enemies. They had smarted too long
under the taunts of other Moslem sects. Armed men, reeking with dust
and fury, intruded. The harem was laid desecrate. The women crouched
upon the floor of the inner chamber awaiting the sword. Theodosia
retired to the room which privilege had accorded her and sat bolt
upright. It had struck her that they would not dare to kill her while
she carried child, the sacred child of the head of their own religion.
But was it likely that they could know of her condition? She was only
thinking how to save her child. Fate seemed always condemning her to
child-bearing in perilous places. She stripped her pregnant body and
threw over herself the beautiful opera cloak that her lover had given
her. Then she waited. She could hear the harem being interrogated and
repeating the formulas of Antichrist: “There is one God and Mohammed
is his Prophet!” Each woman repeated the words with abject and craven
eagerness. Theodosia was listening and wondering whether their
repetition on her own lips would save her child or not. A certain pride
sat in the place of her soul.
The search for the infidel woman followed. The inner apartments were
ravaged, but the fanatics were surprised to see a white woman advancing
coolly towards them, clad in a dark electric blue and green cloak
fringed with ostrich fluff round her neck. There was a wild cry:
“There is one God and Mohammed is his Prophet!” She stood smilingly
shaking her head. Her nonchalance roused their fury and a man advanced
threateningly. She saw the glint of steel in his hand and her feet
froze to the marble steps. She was surrounded by assassins on every
side, and she was not unaware of the danger. She opened her cloak and
lifting it upon both arms, said simply, “Respect the child of the
highly favoured son of the Prophet.” They drew back, crying, “It is
true! She bears the child of the Prophet. Let her acknowledge Islam
and live!” She stood there watching them idly and carelessly as in a
dream. “Acknowledge there is one God and Mohammed is his Prophet!” they
screamed, with swords and daggers lifted within striking distances.
“There is one God,” she replied, and a silence as of death weighed
upon the Palace and upon her words. “The Father is God, and the Son is
God, and the Holy Ghost is God!” A groan passed through the fanatics
on hearing this Christian blasphemy within the very dwelling of the
head of their faith. Was it possible that this white infidel had been
tolerated within, as rumour said, in order to corrupt the Moslem wives
of the holy one and to defile the very hearth of their religion with
Christianity? Now they knew the worst. They threw themselves upon her,
and holding her wrists and ankles, carried her within and out of sight
of the other women.... There was a pause and no sound was heard in
that Palace until the cry of a newly-delivered child. A crowd of men
and women had gathered outside. To them was shortly carried a dusky
new-born boy. All knelt in adoration, for it was a Prince of the blood
and kindred of the Prophet, and the hereditary head of the faith.
Perfect and unscratched and unbruised was the child, as always are
children born Cæsareanwise.
But even in that last hour of agony Theodosia found joy to look upon
the child that was born into the world, before it was taken away from
her for ever, and strength to cry aloud to her torturers, “The Father
is God and the Son is God!” She could say no further, for a strong
hand took her throat and she felt a ropelike strangulation shorten
and finally quench her consciousness. Fiercely the blood seethed in
her temples and the breath battered the tissue of her lungs. Swiftly,
swiftly the fairy blood danced out of her heart and poured in torrents
upon the floor. Slowly, slowly she died, not unworthily of a daughter
of John Calvin, and was at eternal rest.
In the days of the Roman persecutions she would have not failed to
become a spouse of Christ. She could have stood in the arena as calmly
as she stood in the seraglio, and let her body be meshed by the net of
the _retiarius_ as smilingly as she had lifted the folds of her opera
cloak. When the women crept back frightened in the morning they found
her body where her slayers had left it. Round her twisted neck was
tightly tied a long plait of her primrose-coloured hair. It lay like
a spilth of wild honey upon a broken bough of a white ash-tree in the
first break of dawn, after a stormy night in some far away country of
the West.
MIDIR AND ETAIN
Once upon a time the Kingdom of Meath was as rocky and stone-bound as
the fields of Connaught to-day. Etain the girl fairy lived with Midir
the King of the Elf-mounds of Ireland. She was the most beautiful of
her kind, for the folk of Ireland judged beauty ever afterward by Etain
the beautiful, but she was unstable and fitful. She had a mind and a
half-memory, as well as a full memory. It was out of her half-memory
that Midir heard her speak in her sleep of other lovers beside himself.
With brooding on her strangeness he became a stranger to her in his own
mind. With that he left her and went riding upon his coal-black horse.
A snow-white hound ran for shadow by its side, for no fairy horse can
throw a shape upon the ground.
It was a second wife he brought home. She was also of the fey, and her
jealousy was more terrible than the jealousy of women born. She dealt
secretly with her Druids to ply Etain with spells. They made Etain as
a butterfly that eateth flowers. Etain fluttered vainly into Midir’s
sight, but his eyes were cast elsewhere and the Druids’ wind blew Etain
like a silken leaf across moor. Seven years she was carried hither and
thither by the king-winds of Ireland until she lighted in the palace of
Midir’s dear foster-son by the Boyne water. He knew her for woman under
fey and built her a little house with windows instead of doors, and
fed her with bog myrtle and rowanberries. At evening she would assume
her ancient beauty. For the Druid spell was by the Sun and by the
Moon and lost power in the twilight, which is neither of sunshine nor
moonlight. Midir’s Druids knew she was come by Boyne water and hastened
till they found her bower hanging like a swallow’s room to the palace
walls. Etain was drying her wings in the light. With a magic blast they
tossed her again upon the elements, and for seven years she floated
like a little satin cloud hither and thither.
A lesser wind dropped her into the court where the people of Ulster
sucked sweet hydromel from methers. Etain fell into the cup beside the
King’s wife. It was a woman’s cup and white with milk, so that she
swallowed Etain for a white curd. In earthly shape was Etain reborn and
then was she called Etain, for her fairy name was not revealed then or
thereafter by dream or Druid. With Ulster’s princely daughters she was
reared till the noon of maidenhead. One day they bathed together in the
blue speckled sea. A strange horseman rode by upon a coal-black horse,
and a seagull sailed for silvery shadow under its hoofs. All but Etain
slipped into the waves, but she stood, caught in her half-mind. The
stranger said, so that she heard:
“She was so delicate that a Queen quaffed her unwitting. Her place is
not with earth children. For her sake Meath shall be smoother than sea
and the Elf-mounds of Ireland laid in ruin. The men of Ireland shall
measure beauty by her name for ever.”
He said, and slipped behind air and was unseen. Hither and thither the
princely maidens of Ulster waded for wonder and for fear of his words.
But Etain stood trembling like a winged thing in a draught of fire.
Eochy was King of Ireland and lived in the demesne of Meath. For the
man of Meath is the ruler of the men of Ireland. But the rocks of Meath
gave no place to his horses, and the rushes no milk to his cows. He
was wont to ride round Ireland visiting every King and Kingling of his
allegiance. His loneliness for one was not healed by the company of the
many. He stayed unwedded, not finding mate among the royal women of
Ireland. Harpers he had sent upon horses and wizards upon air to find
one willing and worthy to queen Ireland. Lastly he rode out with only
a favourite harper alone with him. Toward evening they found Etain. A
purple mantle stitched with silver hung across her shoulder. With a
silver comb she drew her hair into plaits. Her cheeks were red as the
sun upon the West, and her arms were whiter than the snow falling at
dawn. Her teeth were pearls dashed in the foam of the sea. Her eyebrows
were darker than the wing of the bright beetle.
The King asked her name. “I am Etain of the Elf-mounds,” she said; for
by dreaming she had happed upon the place she came from. He asked if
she were betrothed, and she told him that the Kings and noblemen of the
Faery came wooing her by all the wells and waterways of Ireland. To
forsake all the women of the world the King promised, if she would but
come with him to Meath. But for love of the World-under-wave she would
not queen Ireland.
Eochy returned to his home. By day he lay him down, and by night he
rode and swam. Love of Etain let him not enjoy the life and valour of
the world. Druid and harper could not quell the pangs of his pain nor
the sorrow of his sickness. A leech came, who could tell the disease in
the house from the smoke curling on the roof-top. “No need to lament,”
quoth he, approaching the palace, “this man is undone by one of the two
peerless plagues which afflict the men of Ireland. It is envy or it
is love.” He saw the King and said: “It is not envy. It is beyond the
dream of Druid and the healing of harpers. The herb of the physician
cannot attain thereto.” The King rose and said: “My disease hath run
deeper than my covering of skin. My love is a kingdom of strength and I
am held therein. I am wrestling with a spectre. I am tossed to Heaven
and I am thrown into the sea. I am enamoured of an echo.”
“Better seek the rock that gave you the echo,” said the leech, and
the King set riding again with his harper. When they approached the
dwelling of Etain, the King sent his harper to play in her hearing
while he waited the distance of the sound away. Etain saw the King
passing and took no notice, for she saw the darkness of his horse’s
shadow upon the rocks. But of his sweetest the royal harper harped.
When he played of the wonders and wooings of Meath, Etain listened
and the Boyne river passed from her memory, and the Kingdom of the
Elf-mounds from her half-memory. She rose to reward the harper. Nothing
would he take but to tell her his story. He told her of Eochy, High
King of Ireland, wasting away for her sake, until she took pity and
told him to send the King to tryst at dawn that he might live and not
die of her.
At dawn of dawn one drew near to her, and courted her with tales of
the beauty and bravery of Meath. She soothed his love and went her way
in the twilight. In the true dawn came the King, and when he found
her gone he wished to lie down and die. His harper found Etain and
persuaded her to tryst with the King at the dawn of the morrow. Once
again it was the wraith that came to Etain in the twilight of dawn,
but with the likeness and the voice of Eochy. The wraith told her that
the women of Meath had lost all beauty in the night. Etain said: “It
is with Eochy and not with you that I trysted at dawn lest he should
come to his death.” The wraith replied: “It were better that you should
court me than the sick King, for I was your lover in the aforetime.”
Ever was Etain remembering, and the wraith spoke to her by the fairy
name that lay in her half-memory, and said: “I am Midir and by the
sorcery of Druids we were driven apart. Again have I found thee as
ever of enduring beauty and faithless mind. When I prattled to thee of
the Methians thou thoughtest I was their King. King am I only of those
who pass under wave and beyond world.” Then was Etain divided between
her love for Faery and her anger at the trick which Midir had played
against her, and she made pretence that she would marry the man who
had Meath for his own. Answered Midir: “Can I not give thee all the
may-meadows and well-waters of Ireland for bride gift?” Answered Etain:
“Even so would I not exchange the Methian royalty for thy lineage,
which is none that men know.” “True said,” replied Midir, “for there is
no lineage where there is neither birth nor death.” Fiercely he pressed
her to return with him to the Elf-mounds, saying: “Thou shalt live for
ever with the primrose-haired. Thou shalt be Queen of the tribes who
pass all-seeing and unseen through the hills of Ireland. Pleasant are
the plains of Ireland, but there is a Plain which is beyond pleasure.
Delicious to the minds of men is the sweet hydromel that the women
of Ireland brew in vats, but the drink of my country enchanteth every
sense together.”