God is deaf. He must be deaf--or very cruel. Look; everything lives in
pain; and yet no God pities and makes an end of the earth. I would--if I
were He. Look--at dawn, the other day, I was out in the wood. I came
upon a little rabbit in a trap; a little, pretty, soft black-and-white
thing, quite young. It was screaming in its horrible misery; it
had been screaming all night. Its thighs were broken in the iron teeth;
the trap held it tight; it could not escape, it could only
scream--scream--scream. All in vain. When I had set it free it was
mangled as if a wolf had gnawed it; the iron teeth had bitten through
the fur, and the flesh, and the bone; it had lost so much blood, and it
was in so much pain, that it could not live. I laid it down in the
bracken, and put water to its mouth, and did what I could; but it was of
no use. It had been too much hurt. It died as the sun rose; a little,
harmless, shy, happy thing, you know, that never killed any creature,
and only asked to nibble a leaf or two, or sleep in a little round hole,
and run about merry and free. How can one care for a God since He lets
these things be?"
Arslàn smiled as he heard.
"Child,--men care for a god only as a god means a good to them. Men are
heirs of heaven, they say; and, in right of their heritage, they make
life hell to every living thing that dares dispute the world with them.
You do not understand that,--tut! You are not human then. If you were
human, you would begrudge a blade of grass to a rabbit, and arrogate to
yourself a lease of immortality."
* * *
"Of a winter night," she said, slowly, "I have heard old Pitchou read
aloud to Flamma, and she reads of their God, the one they hang
everywhere on the crosses here; and the story ran that the populace
scourged and nailed to death the one whom they knew afterwards, when too
late, to have been the great man that they looked for, and that, being
bidden to make their choice of one to save, they chose to ransom and
honour a thief: one called Barabbas. Is it true?--if the world's choice
were wrong once, why not twice?"
Arslàn smiled; the smile she knew so well, and which had no more warmth
than the ice floes of his native seas.
"Why not twice? Why not a thousand times? A thief has the world's
sympathies always. It is always the Barabbas--the trickster in talent,
the forger of stolen wisdom, the bravo of political crime, the huckster
of plundered thoughts, the charlatan of false art, whom the vox populi
elects and sets free, and sends on his way rejoicing. 'Will ye have
Christ or Barabbas?' Every generation is asked the same question, and
every generation gives the same answer; and scourges the divinity out of
its midst, and finds its idol in brute force and low greed."
She only dimly comprehended, not well knowing why her words had thus
roused him. She pondered awhile, then her face cleared.
"But the end?" she asked. "The dead God is the God of all these people
round us now, and they have built great places in His honour, and they
bow when they pass His likeness in the highway or the market-place. But
with Barabbas--what was the end? It seems that they loathe and despise
him?"
Arslàn laughed a little.
"His end? In Syria may be the vultures picked his bones, where they lay
whitening on the plains--those times were primitive, the world was
young. But in our day Barabbas lives and dies in honour, and has a tomb
that stares all men in the face, setting forth his virtues, so that all
who run may read. In our day Barabbas--the Barabbas of money-greeds and
delicate cunning, and the theft which has risen to science, and the
assassination that kills souls and not bodies, and the crime that deals
moral death and not material death--our Barabbas, who is crowned Fraud
in the place of mailed Force, lives always in purple and fine linen, and
ends in the odours of sanctity with the prayers of priests over his
corpse."
He spoke with a certain fierce passion that rose in him whenever he
thought of that world which had rejected him, and had accepted so many
others, weaker in brain and nerve, but stronger in one sense, because
more dishonest; and as he spoke he went straight to a wall on his right,
where a great sea of grey paper was stretched, untouched and ready to
his hand.
She would have spoken, but he made a motion to silence.
"Hush! be quiet," he said to her, almost harshly, "I have thought of
something."
And he took the charcoal and swept rapidly with it over the dull blank
surface till the vacancy glowed with life. A thought had kindled in him;
a vision had arisen before him.
The scene around him vanished utterly from his sight. The grey stone
walls, the square windows through which the fading sun-rays fell; the
level pastures and sullen streams, and paled skies without, all faded
away as though they had existed only in a dream.
All the empty space about him became peopled with many human shapes that
for him had breath and being, though no other eye could have beheld
them. The old Syrian world of eighteen hundred years before arose and
glowed before him. The things of his own life died away, and in their
stead he saw the fierce flame of eastern suns, the gleaming range of
marble palaces, the purple flush of pomegranate flowers, the deep colour
of oriental robes, the soft silver of hills olive crested, the tumult of
a city at high festival. And he could not rest until all he thus saw in
his vision he had rendered as far as his hand could render it; and what
he drew was this.
A great thirsty, heated, seething crowd; a crowd that had manhood and
womanhood, age and infancy, youths and maidens within its ranks; a crowd
in whose faces every animal lust and every human passion were let loose;
a crowd on which a noon sun without shadow streamed; a sun which parched
and festered and engendered all corruption in the land on which it
looked. This crowd was in a city, a city on whose flat roofs the myrtle
and the cistus bloomed; above whose walls the plumes of olives waved;
upon whose distant slopes the darkling cedar groves rose straight
against the sky, and on whose lofty temple plates of gold glistened
against the shining heavens. This crowd had scourges, and stones, and
goads in their hands; and in their midst they led one clothed in white,
whose head was thorn-crowned, and whose eyes were filled with a god's
pity and a man's reproach; and him they stoned, and lashed, and hooted.
And triumphant in the throng, whose choice he was, seated aloft upon
men's shoulders, with a purple robe thrown on his shoulders, there sat a
brawny, grinning, bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage
eyes, and satyr's leer: the creature of greed, of lust, of obscenity, of
brutality, of avarice, of desire. This thing the people followed,
rejoicing exceedingly, content in the guide whom they had chosen,
victorious in the fiend for whom they spurned a deity; crying, with wide
open throats and brazen lungs,--"Barabbas!"
There was not a form in all this close-packed throng which had not a
terrible irony in it, which was not in itself a symbol of some appetite
or of some vice, for which women and men abjure the godhead in them.
A gorged drunkard lay asleep with his amphora broken beneath him, the
stream of the purple wine lapped eagerly by ragged children. A
money-changer had left the receipt of custom, eager to watch and shout,
and a thief clutched both hands full of the forsaken coins and fled.
A miser had dropped a bag of gold, and stopped to catch at all the
rolling pieces, regardless in his greed how the crowd trampled and trod
on him. A mother chid and struck her little brown curly child, because
he stretched his arms and turned his face towards the thorn-crowned
captive.
A priest of the temple, with a blood-stained knife thrust in his girdle,
dragged beside him, by the throat, a little tender lamb doomed for the
sacrifice.
A dancing woman with jewels in her ears, and half naked to the waist,
sounding the brazen cymbals above her head, drew a score of youths after
her in Barabbas' train.
On one of the flat roof tops, reclining on purple and fine linen,
looking down on the street below from the thick foliage of her citron
boughs and her red Syrian roses, was an Egyptian wanton; and leaning
beside her, tossing golden apples in her bosom, was a young centurion of
the Roman guard, languid and laughing, with his fair chest bare to the
heat, and his armour flung in a pile beside him.
And thus, in like manner, every figure bore its parable; and above all
was the hard, hot, cruel, cloudless sky of blue, without one faintest
mist to break its horrible serenity, whilst high in the azure ether and
against the sun, an eagle and a vulture fought, locked close, and
tearing at each other's breasts.
Six nights this conception occupied him. His days were not his own, he
spent them in a rough mechanical labour which his strength executed
while his mind was far away from it; but the nights were all his, and at
the end of the sixth night the thing arose, perfect as far as his hand
could perfect it; begotten by a chance and ignorant word as have been
many of the greatest works the world has seen;--oaks sprung from the
acorn that a careless child has let fall.
When he had finished it his arm dropped to his side, he stood
motionless; the red glow of the dawn lighting the depths of his
sleepless eyes.
* * *
It was a level green silent country which was round her, with little
loveliness and little colour; but as she went she laughed incessantly
in the delirious gladness of her liberty.
She tossed her head back to watch the flight of a single swallow; she
caught a handful of green leaves and buried her face in them. She
listened in a very agony of memory to the rippling moisture of a little
brook. She followed with her eyes the sweeping vapours of the
rain-clouds, and when a west wind rose and blew a cluster of loose apple
blossoms between her eyes--she could no longer bear the passionate pain
of all the long-lost sweetness, but flinging herself downward, sobbed
with the ecstasy of an exile's memories.
The hell in which she had dwelt had denied them to her for so long.
"Ah God!" she thought, "I know now--one cannot be utterly wretched
whilst one has still the air and the light and the winds of the sky."
And she arose, calmer, and went on her way; wondering, even in that
hour, why men and women trod the daily measures of their lives with
their eyes downward and their ears choked with the dust; hearkening so
little to the sound of the breeze in the grasses, looking so little to
the passage of the clouds against the sun.
* * *
The ground ascended as it stretched seaward, but on it there were only
wide dull fields of colza or of grass lying, sickly and burning, under
the fire of the late afternoon sun.
The slope was too gradual to break their monotony.
Above them was the cloudless weary blue; below them was the faint
parched green; other colour there was none; one little dusky panting
bird flew by pursued by a kite; that was the only change.
She asked him no questions; she walked mutely and patiently by his side;
she hated the dull heat, the colourless waste, the hard scorch of the
air, the dreary changelessness of the scene. But she did not say so. He
had chosen to come to them.
A league onward the fields were merged into a heath, uncultivated and
covered with short prickly furze; on the brown earth between the stunted
bushes a few goats were cropping the burnt-up grasses. Here the slope
grew sharper, and the earth seemed to rise up between the sky and them,
steep and barren as a house-roof.
Once he asked her--
"Are you tired?"
She shook her head.
Her feet ached, and her heart throbbed; her limbs were heavy like lead
in the heat and the toil. But she did not tell him so. She would have
dropped dead from exhaustion rather than have confessed to him any
weakness.
He took the denial as it was given, and pressed onward up the ascent.
The sun was slanting towards the west; the skies seemed like brass; the
air was sharp, yet scorching; the dull brown earth still rose up before
them like a wall; they climbed it slowly and painfully, their hands and
their teeth filled with its dust, which drifted in a cloud before them.
He bade her close her eyes, and she obeyed him. He stretched his arm out
and drew her after him up the ascent, which was slippery from drought
and prickly from the stunted growth of furze.
On the summit he stood still and released her.
"Now look."
She opened her eyes with the startled, half-questioning stare of one
led out from utter darkness into a full and sudden light.
Then, with a great cry, she sank down on the rock, trembling, weeping,
laughing, stretching out her arms to the new glory that met her sight,
dumb with its grandeur, delirious with its delight.
For what she saw was the sea.
Before her dazzled sight all its beauty stretched, the blueness of the
waters meeting the blueness of the skies; radiant with all the marvels
of its countless hues; softly stirred by a low wind that sighed across
it; bathed in a glow of gold that streamed on it from the westward;
rolling from north to south in slow, sonorous measure, filling the
silent air with the ceaseless melody of its wondrous voice.
The lustre of the sunset beamed upon it; the cool fresh smell of its
waters shot like new life through all the scorch and stupor of the day;
its white foam curled and broke on the brown curving rocks and wooded
inlets of the shores; innumerable birds, that gleamed like silver,
floated or flew above its surface; all was still, still as death, save
only for the endless movement of those white swift wings and the murmur
of the waves, in which all meaner and harsher sounds of earth seemed
lost and hushed to slumber and to silence.
The sea alone reigned, as it reigned in the young years of the earth
when men were not; as, may be, it will be its turn to reign again in the
years to come, when men and all their works shall have passed away and
be no more seen nor any more remembered.
Arslàn watched her in silence.
He was glad that it should awe and move her thus. The sea was the only
thing for which he cared, or which had any power over him. In the
northern winters of his youth he had known the ocean, in one wild
night's work, undo all that men had done to check and rule it, and
burst through all the barriers that they had raised against it, and
throw down the stones of the altar and quench the fires of the hearth,
and sweep through the fold and the byre, and flood the cradle of the
child and the grave of the grandsire.
He had seen its storms wash away at one blow the corn harvests of years,
and gather in the sheep from the hills, and take the life of the
shepherd with the life of the flock. He had seen it claim lovers locked
in each other's arms, and toss the fair curls of the first-born as it
tossed the riband weeds of its deeps. And he had felt small pity; it had
rather given him a certain sense of rejoicing and triumph to see the
water laugh to scorn those who were so wise in their own conceit, and
bind beneath its chains those who held themselves masters over all
beasts of the field and birds of the air.
Other men dreaded the sea and cursed it; but he in his way loved it
almost with passion, and could he have chosen the manner of his death
would have desired that it should be by the sea and through the sea; a
death cold and serene and dreamily voluptuous: a death on which no woman
should look and in which no man should have share.
He watched her now for some time without speaking. When the first
paroxysm of her emotion had exhausted itself, she stood motionless, her
figure like a statue of bronze against the sun, her head sunk upon her
breast, her arms outstretched as though beseeching that wondrous
brightness which she saw to take her to itself and make her one with it.
Her whole attitude expressed an unutterable worship. She was like one
who for the first time hears of God.
"What is it you feel?" he asked her suddenly. He knew without asking;
but he had made it his custom to dissect all her joys and sufferings
with little heed whether he thus added to either.
At the sound of his voice she started, and a shiver shook her as she
answered him slowly, without withdrawing her gaze from the waters.
"It has been there always--always--so near me?"
"Before the land, the sea was."
"And I never knew!"--
Her head drooped on her breast; great tears rolled silently down her
cheeks; her arms fell to her sides; she shivered again and sighed. She
knew all that she had lost--this is the greatest grief that life holds.
"You never knew," he made answer. "There was only a sand-hill between
you and all this glory; but the sand-hill was enough. Many people never
climb theirs all their lives long."
The words and their meaning escaped her.
She had for once no remembrance of him, nor any other sense save of this
surpassing wonder that had thus burst on her--this miracle that had been
near her for so long, yet of which she had never in all her visions
dreamed.
She was quite silent; sunk there on her knees, motionless, and gazing
straight, with eyes unblenching, at the light.
There was no sound near them, nor was there anything in sight except
where above against the deepest azure of the sky two curlews were
circling around each other, and in the distance a single ship was
gliding, with sails silvered by the sun. All signs of human life lay far
behind; severed from them by those steep scorched slopes swept only by
the plovers and the bees. And all the while she looked slow tears
gathered in her eyes and fell, and the loud hard beating of her heart
was audible in the hushed stillness of the upper air.
He waited awhile: then he spoke to her.
"Since it pains you, come away."
A great sob shuddered through her.
"Give me that pain," she muttered, "sooner than any joy. Pain? pain?--it
is life, heaven--liberty!"
For suddenly those words which she had heard spoken around her, and
which had been to her like the mutterings of the deaf and the dumb,
became real to her with thousand meanings.
The seagulls were lost in the heights of the air; the ship sailed on
into the light till the last gleam of its canvas vanished; the sun sank
westward lower and lower till it glowed in a globe of flame upon the
edge of the water: she never moved; standing there on the summit of the
cliff, with her head drooped upon her breast, her form thrown out dark
and motionless against the gold of the western sky, on her face still
that look of one who worships with intense honour and passionate faith
an unknown God.
The sun sank entirely, leaving only a trail of flame across the heavens;
the waters grew grey and purple in the shadows; one boat, black against
the crimson reflections of the west, swept on swiftly with the
in-rushing tide; the wind rose and blew long curls of seaweed on the
rocks; the shores of the bay were dimmed in a heavy mist, through which
the lights of the little hamlets dimly glowed, and the distant voices of
fishermen calling to each other as they drew in their deep-sea nets came
faint and weirdlike.
* * *
What she wanted was to live. Live as the great moor bird did that she
had seen float one day over these pale, pure, blue skies, with its
mighty wings outstretched in the calm grey weather; which came none knew
whence, and which went none knew whither; which poised silent and
stirless against the clouds; then called with a sweet wild love-note to
its mate, and waited for him as he sailed in from the misty shadows
where the sea lay; and with him rose yet higher and higher in the air;
and passed westward, cleaving the fields of light, and so vanished;--a
queen of the wind, a daughter of the sun; a creature of freedom, of
victory, of tireless movement, and of boundless space, a thing of heaven
and of liberty.
* * *
In the springtime of the year three gods watched by the river.
The golden flowers of the willows blew in the low winds; the waters came
and went; the moon rose full and cold over a silvery stream; the reeds
sighed in the silence.
Two winters had drifted by and one hot drowsy summer since their creator
had forsaken them, and all the white still shapes upon the walls already
had been slain by the cold breath of Time. The green weeds waved in the
empty casements; the chance-sown seeds of thistles and of bell-flowers
were taking leaf between the square stones of the paven places; on the
deserted threshold lichens and brambles climbed together; the filmy ooze
of a rank vegetation stole over the loveliness of Persephone and
devoured one by one the divine offspring of Zeus; about the feet of the
bound sun king in Pheroe and over the calm serene mockery of Hermes'
smile the grey nets of the spiders' webs had been woven to and fro,
across and across, with the lacing of a million threads, as Fate weaves
round the limbs and covers the eyes of mortals as they stumble blindly
from their birthplace to their grave. All things, the damp and the dust,
the frost and the scorch, the newts and the rats, the fret of the
flooded waters, and the stealing sure inroad of the mosses that
everywhere grew from the dews and the fogs, had taken and eaten, in
hunger or sport, or had touched, and thieved from, then left, gangrened
and ruined.
The three gods alone remained; who being the sons of eternal night, are
unharmed, unaltered, by any passage of the years of earth. The only gods
who never bend beneath the yoke of years; but unblenchingly behold the
nations wither as uncounted leaves, and the lands and the seas change
their places, and the cities and the empires pass away as a tale that is
told; and the deities that are worshipped in the temples alter in name
and attributes and cultus, at the wanton will of the age which begot
them.
In the still, cold, moonlit air their shadows stood together. Hand in
hand; looking outward through the white night-mists. Other gods perished
with the faith of each age as it changed; other gods lived by the breath
of men's lips, the tears of prayer, the smoke of sacrifice. But
they,--their empire was the universe.
In every young soul that leaps into the light of life rejoicing blindly,
Oneiros has dominion; and he alone. In every creature that breathes,
from the conqueror resting on a field of blood to the nest bird cradled
in its bed of leaves, Hypnos holds a sovereignty which nothing mortal
can long resist and live. And Thanatos,--to him belongs every created
thing, past, present, and to come; beneath his feet all generations lie;
and in the hollow of his hand he holds the worlds; though the earth be
tenantless, and the heavens sunless, and the planets shrivel in their
courses, and the universe be shrouded in an endless night, yet through
the eternal desolation Thanatos still will reign, and through the
eternal darkness, through the immeasurable solitudes, he alone will
wander, and he still behold his work.
Deathless as themselves their shadows stood; and the worm and the lizard
and the newt left them alone and dared not wind about their calm clear
brows, and dared not steal to touch the roses at their lips, knowing
that ere the birth of the worlds these were, and when the worlds shall
have perished these still will reign on:--the slow, sure, soundless,
changeless ministers of an eternal rest, of an eternal oblivion.
A late light strayed in from the grey skies, pale as the primrose
flowers that grew amongst the reeds upon the shore; and found its way to
them, trembling; and shone in the far-seeing depths of their
unfathomable eyes.
The eyes which spake and said:
"Sleep, dreams, and death:--we are the only gods that answer prayer."
* * *
Night had come; a dark night of earliest spring. The wild day had sobbed
itself to sleep after a restless life with fitful breath of storm and
many sighs of shuddering breezes.
The sun had sunk, leaving long tracks of blood-red light across one-half
the heavens.
There was a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost in the gloom and
the dulness. Heavy clouds, as yet unbroken, hung over the cathedral and
the clustering roofs around it in dark and starless splendour.
Over the great still plains which stretched eastward and southward,
black with the furrows of the scarce-budded corn, the wind blew hard;
blowing the river and the many streamlets spreading from it into foam;
driving the wintry leaves which still strewed the earth thickly, hither
and thither in legions; breaking boughs that had weathered the winter
hurricanes, and scattering the tender blossoms of the snowdrops and the
earliest crocuses in all the little moss-grown garden ways.
The smell of wet grass, of the wood-born violets, of trees whose new
life was waking in their veins, of damp earths turned freshly upwards by
the plough, were all blown together by the riotous breezes.
Now and then a light gleamed through the gloom where a little peasant
boy lighted home with a torch some old priest on his mule, or a boat
went down the waters with a lamp hung at its prow. For it grew dark
early, and people used to the river read a threat of a flood on its
face.