where Marcellin first had seen her as a child amongst the scarlet blaze
of the poppies.
The lands were all yellow with saffron and emerald with the young corn;
she balanced on her head a great brass jar; the red girdle glowed about
her waist as she moved: the wind stirred the folds of her garments; her
feet were buried in the shining grass; clouds tawny and purple were
behind her; she looked like some Moorish phantom seen in a dream under a
sky of Spain.
He paused and gazed at her with eyes half content, half cold.
She was of a beauty so uncommon, so strange, and all that was his for
his art:--a great artist, whether in words, in melody, or in colour, is
always cruel, or at the least seems so, for all things that live under
the sun are to him created only to minister to his one inexorable
passion.
Art is so vast, and human life is so little. It is to him only supremely
just that the insect of an hour should be sacrificed to the infinite and
eternal truth which must endure until the heavens themselves shall
wither as a scroll that is held in a flame. It might have seemed to
Arslàn base to turn her ignorance, and submission to his will, for the
gratification of his amorous passions; but to make these serve the art
to which he had himself abandoned every earthly good was in his sight
justified, as the death agonies of the youth whom they decked with roses
and slew in sacrifice to the sun, were in the sight of the Mexican
nation.
The youth whom the Mexicans slew, on the high hill of the city, with his
face to the west, was always the choicest and the noblest of all the
opening flower of their manhood: for it was his fate to be called to
enter into the realms of eternal light, and to dwell face to face with
the unbearable brightness without whose rays the universe would have
perished frozen in perpetual night. So the artist, who is true to his
art, regards every human sacrifice that he renders up to it; how can he
feel pity for a thing which perishes to feed a flame that he deems the
life of the world?
The steel that he draws out from the severed heart of his victim he is
ready to plunge into his own vitals: no other religion can vaunt as much
of its priests.
"What are you thinking of to-night?" he asked her where she came through
the fields by the course of a little flower-sown brook, fringed with
tall bulrushes and waving willow-stems.
She lifted her eyelids with a dreamy and wistful regard.
"I was thinking--I wonder what the reed felt that you told me of--the
one reed that a god chose from all its millions by the waterside and cut
down to make into a flute."
"Ah?--you see there are no reeds that make music now-a-days; the reeds
are only good to be woven into kreels for the fruits and the fish of the
market."
"That is not the fault of the reeds?"
"Not that I know; it is the fault of men, most likely, who find the
chink of coin in barter sweeter music than the song of the syrinx. But
what do you think the reed felt then?--pain to be so sharply severed
from its fellows?"
"No--or the god would not have chosen it."
"What then?"
A troubled sigh parted her lips; these old fables were fairest truths to
her, and gave a grace to every humblest thing that the sun shone on, or
the waters begat from their foam, or the winds blew with their breath
into the little life of a day.
"I was trying to think. But I cannot be sure. These reeds have
forgotten. They have lost their soul. They want nothing but to feed
among the sand and the mud, and grow in millions together, and shelter
the toads and the newts,--there is not a note of music in them
all--except when the wind rises and makes them sigh, and then they
remember that long, long-ago the breath of a great god was in them."
Arslàn looked at her where she stood; her eyes resting on the reeds, and
the brook at her feet; the crimson heat of the evening all about her, on
the brazen amphora, on the red girdle on her loins, on the thoughtful
parted lips, on the proud bent brows above which a golden butterfly
floated as above the brows of Psyche.
He smiled; the smile that was so cold to her.
"Look: away over the fields, there comes a peasant with a sickle; he
comes to mow down the reeds to make a bed for his cattle. If he heard
you, he would think you mad."
"They have thought me many things worse. What matter?"
"Nothing at all;--that I know. But you seem to envy that reed--so long
ago--that was chosen?"
"Who would not?"
"Are you so sure? The life of the reed was always pleasant;--dancing
there in the light, playing with the shadows, blowing in the winds; with
the cool waters all about it all day long, and the yellow daffodils and
the blue bell-flowers for its brethren."
"Nay;--how do you know?"
Her voice was low, and thrilled with a curious eager pain.
"How do you know?" she murmured. "Rather,--it was born in the sands,
amongst the stones, of the chance winds, of the stray germs,--no one
asking, no one heeding, brought by a sunbeam, spat out by a toad--no one
caring where it dropped. Rather,--it grew there by the river, and such
millions of reeds grew with it, that neither waters nor winds could
care for a thing so common and worthless, but the very snakes twisting
in and out despised it, and thrust the arrows of their tongues through
it in scorn. And then--I think I see!--the great god walked by the edge
of the river, and he mused on a gift to give man, on a joy that should
be a joy on the earth for ever; and he passed by the lily white as snow,
by the thyme that fed the bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by
the orange flame of the tall sandrush, by all the great water-blossoms
which the sun kissed, and the swallows loved, and he came to the one
little reed pierced with the snakes' tongues, and all alone amidst
millions. Then he took it up, and cut it to the root, and killed
it;--killed it as a reed,--but breathed into it a song audible and
beautiful to all the ears of men. Was that death to the reed?--or life?
Would a thousand summers of life by the waterside have been worth that
one thrill of song when a god first spoke through it?"
Her face lightened with a radiance to which the passion of her words was
pale and poor; the vibrations of her voice grew sonorous and changing as
the sounds of music itself; her eyes beamed through unshed tears as
planets through the rain.
* * *
Of all the forms with which he had peopled its loneliness, these had the
most profound influence on her in their fair, passionless, majestic
beauty, in which it seemed to her that the man who had forgotten them
had repeated his own likeness. For they were all alike, yet unlike; of
the same form and feature, yet different even in their strong
resemblance, like elder and younger brethren who hold a close
companionship. For Hypnos was still but a boy with his blue-veined
eyelids closed, and his mouth rosy and parted like that of a slumbering
child, and above his golden head a star rose in the purple night.
Oneiros standing next was a youth whose eyes smiled as though they
beheld visions that were welcome to him; in his hand, amongst the white
roses, he held a black wand of sorcery, and around his bended head there
hovered a dim silvery nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and
on his calm and colourless face there were blended an unutterable
sadness, and an unspeakable peace; his eyes were fathomless,
far-reaching, heavy laden with thought, as though they had seen at once
the heights of heaven and the depths of hell; and he, having thus seen,
and knowing all things, had learned that there was but one good possible
in all the universe,--that one gift which his touch gave, and which men
in their blindness shuddered from and cursed. And above him and around
him there was a great darkness.
So the gods stood, and so they spoke, even to her; they seemed to her as
brethren, masters, friends--these three immortals who looked down on her
in their mute majesty.
They are the gods of the poor, of the wretched, of the outcast, of the
proscribed,--they are the gods who respect not persons nor palaces,--who
stay with the exile and flee from the king,--who leave the tyrant of a
world to writhe in torment, and call a smile beautiful as the morning on
the face of a beggar child,--who turn from the purple beds where wealth
and lust and brutal power lie, and fill with purest visions the darkest
hours of the loneliest nights, for genius and youth,--they are the gods
of consolation and of compensation,--the gods of the exile, of the
orphan, of the outcast, of the poet, of the prophet, of all whose bodies
ache with the infinite pangs of famine, and whose hearts ache with the
infinite woes of the world, of all who hunger with the body or the
soul.
* * *
It became mid-April. It was market-day for all the country lying round
that wondrous cathedral-spire, which shot into the air far-reaching and
ethereal, like some fountain whose column of water had been arrested
aloft and changed to ice.
The old quiet town was busy, with a rich sunshine shed upon it, in which
the first yellow butterflies of the year had begun to dance.
It was high noon, and the highest tide of the market.
Flower-girls, fruit-girls, egg-sellers, poultry-hucksters, crowds of
women, old and young, had jolted in on their docile asses, throned on
their sheepskin saddles; and now, chattering and chaffering, drove fast
their trade. On the steps of the cathedral boys with birds'-nests,
knife-grinders making their little wheels fly, cobblers hammering, with
boards across their knees, travelling pedlars with knapsacks full of
toys and mirrors, and holy images, and strings of beads, sat side by
side in amicable competition.
Here and there a priest passed, with his black robe and broad hat, like
a dusky mushroom amongst a bed of many-hued gillyflowers. Here and there
a soldier, all colour and glitter, showed like a gaudy red tulip in
bloom amidst tufts of thyme.
The old wrinkled leathern awnings of the market-stalls glowed like
copper in the brightness of noon. The red tiles of the houses edging the
great square were gilded with yellow houseleeks. The little children ran
hither and thither with big bunches of primroses or sheaves of blue
wood-hyacinths, singing. The red and blue serges of the young girls'
bodices were like the gay hues of the anemones in their baskets. The
brown faces of the old dames under the white roofing of their headgear
were like the russet faces of the home-kept apples which they had
garnered through all the winter.
Everywhere in the shade of the flapping leather, and the darkness of
the wooden porches, there were the tender blossoms of the field and
forest, of the hedge and garden. The azure of the hyacinths, the pale
saffron of the primroses, the cool hues of the meadow daffodils, the
ruby eyes of the cultured jonquils, gleamed amongst wet rushes, grey
herbs, and freshly budded leafage. Plovers' eggs nestled in moss-lined
baskets; sheaves of velvet-coated wallflowers poured fragrance on the
air; great plumes of lilac nodded on the wind, and amber feathers of
laburnum waved above the homelier masses of mint and marjoram, and sage
and chervil.
_IDALIA._
Whatever fate rose for them with the dawn, this night at least was
theirs: there is no love like that which lives victorious even beneath
the shadow of death: there is no joy like that which finds its paradise
even amid the cruelty of pain, the fierce long struggle of despair.
Never is the voluptuous glory of the sun so deep, so rich, as when its
last excess of light burns above the purple edge of the tempest-cloud
that soars upward to cover and devour it.
* * *
"And we reign still!"
She turned, as she spoke, towards the western waters, where the sea-line
of the Ægean lay, while in her eyes came the look of a royal pride and
of a deathless love.
"Greece cannot die. No matter what the land be now, Greece--_our_
Greece--must live for ever. Her language lives; the children of Europe
learn it, even if they halt it in imperfect numbers. The greater the
scholar, the humbler he still bends to learn the words of wisdom from
her school. The poet comes to her for all his fairest myths, his noblest
mysteries, his greatest masters. The sculptor looks at the broken
fragments of her statues, and throws aside his calliope in despair
before those matchless wrecks. From her soldiers learn how to die, and
nations how to conquer and to keep their liberties. No deed of heroism
is done but, to crown it, it is named parallel to hers. They write of
love, and who forgets the Lesbian? They dream of freedom, and to reach
it they remember Salamis. They talk of progress, and while they talk
they sigh for all that they have lost in Academus. They seek truth, and
while they seek, wearily long, as little children, to hear the golden
speech of Socrates, that slave, and fisherman, and sailor, and
stonemason, and date-seller were all once free to hear in her Agora. But
for the light that shone from Greece in the breaking of the Renaissance,
Europe would have perished in its Gothic darkness. They call her dead:
she can never die while her life, her soul, her genius breathe fire into
the new nations, and give their youth all of greatness and of grace that
they can claim. Greece dead! She reigns in every poem written, in every
art pursued, in every beauty treasured, in every liberty won, in every
god-like life and godlike death, in your fresh lands, which, but for
her, would be barbarian now."
Where she stood, with her eyes turned westward to the far-off snows of
Cithæron and Mount Ida, and the shores which the bronze spear of Pallas
Athene once guarded through the night and day, the dark light in her
eyes deepened, and the flush of a superb pride was on her brow--it
seemed Aspasia who lived again, and who remembered Pericles.
* * *
The chant of the Imaum rang up from the shore, deep and sonorous,
calling on the Faithful to prayer, an hour before midnight. She listened
dreamily to the echoes that seemed to linger among the dark foliage.
"I like those national calls to prayer," she said, as she leaned over
the parapet, while the fire-flies glittered among the mass of leaves as
the diamond sprays glistened in her hair. "The Ave Maria, the Vespers,
the Imaum's chant, the salutation of the dawn or of the night, the hymn
before sleep, or before the sun;--you have none of those in your chill
islands? You have only weary rituals, and stuccoed churches, where the
'Pharisees for a pretence make long prayers!' As if _that_ was not the
best--the only--temple!"
She glanced upward at the star-studded sky, and on her face was that
graver and gentler look which had come there when she sang.
"I have held it so many a time," he answered her, lying awake at night
among the long grass of the Andes, or under the palms of the desert. It
was a strange delusion to build shrines to the honour of God while there
are still his own--the forests and the mountains.
* * *
"It was a fair heritage to lose through a feeble vanity--that beautiful
Constantinople!" she said musingly. "The East and the West--what an
empire! More than Alexander ever grasped at--what might not have been
done with it? Asian faith and Oriental sublimity, with Roman power and
Gothic force; if there had been a hand strong enough to weld all these
together, what a world there might have been!"
"But to have done that would have been to attain the Impossible," he
answered her. "Oil and flame, old and new, living and dying, tradition
and scepticism, iconoclast and idolater, you cannot unite and harmonise
these antagonisms?"
She gave a sign of dissent.
"The prophet or the hero unites all antagonisms, because he binds them
all to his own genius. The Byzantine empire had none such; the nearest
was Julian, but he believed less in himself than in the gods; the
nearest after him was Belisarius--the fool of a courtesan, and he was
but a good soldier; he was no teacher, no liberator, no leader for the
nations. John Vatices came too late. A man must be his own convert
before he can convert others. Zoroaster, Christ, Mahommed, Cromwell,
Napoleon, believed intensely in their own missions; hence their
influence on the peoples. How can we tell what Byzantium might have
become under one mighty hand? It was torn in pieces among courtesans,
and parasites, and Christian fanatics, and Houmousians and
Houmoiousians! I have the blood of the Commneni in me. I think of it
with shame when I remember what they might have been."
"You come from the Roman Emperors?"
"The Roman Emperors?" she repeated. "When the name was a travesty, an
ignominy, a reproach! When Barbarians thronged the Forum, and the
representative of Galilee fishermen claimed power in the Capitol? Yes; I
descend, they say, from the Commneni; but I am far prouder that, on the
other hand, I come from pure Athenians. I belong to two buried worlds.
But the stone throne of the Areopagus was greater than the gold one of
Manuel."
* * *
"That animal life is to be envied perhaps," she said.
"Their pride is centred in a silver hairpin; their conscience is
committed to a priest; their credulity is contented with tradition;
their days are all the same, from the rising of one sun to another; they
do not love, they do not hate; they are like the ass that they drive,
follow one patient routine, and only take care for their food. Perhaps
they are to be envied!"
"You would not lose 'those thoughts that wander through eternity,' to
gain in exchange the peace from ignorance of the peasant or the
dullard?"
She turned her face to him, with its most beautiful smile on her lips
and in her eyes.
"No, I would not: you are right. Better to know the secrets of the gods,
even though with pain, than to lead the dull, brute life, though
painless. It is only in our dark hours that we would sell our souls for
a dreamless ease."
"Dark hours! _You_ should not know them. Ah, if you would but trust me
with some confidence! if there were but some way in which I could serve
you!"
Her eyes met his with gratitude, even while she gave him a gesture of
silence. She thought how little could the bold, straight stroke of this
man's frank chivalry cut through the innumerable and intricate chains
that entangled her own life. The knightly Excalibur could do nothing to
sever the filmy but insoluble meshes of secret intrigues.
"It is a saint's-day: I had forgotten it," she said to turn his words
from herself, while the bell of the campanile still swung through the
air. "I am a pagan, you see: I do not fancy that you care much for
creeds yourself."
"Creeds? I wish there were no such word. It has only been a rallying-cry
for war, an excuse for the bigot to burn his neighbour."
"No. Long ago, under the Andes, Nezahualcoytl held the same faith that
Socrates had vainly taught in the Agora; and Zengis Khan knew the truth
of theism like Plato; yet the world has never generally learnt it. It is
the religion of nature--of reason. But the faith is too simple and too
sublime for the multitude. The mass of minds needs a religion of
mythics, legend, symbolism, and fear. What is impalpable escapes it; and
it must give an outward and visible shape to its belief, as it gives in
its art a human form to its deity. Come, since we agree in our creed, I
will take you to my temple--a temple not made by hands."
* * *
"I never had a fair field!"--it may be sometimes a coward's apology; but
it is many a time the epitome of a great, cramped, tortured, wasted
life, which strove like a caged eagle to get free, and never could beat
down the bars of the den that circumstances and prejudice had forged.
The world sees the few who do reach freedom, and, watching their bold
upright flight, says rashly, "will can work all things." But they who
perish by the thousand, the fettered eagles who never see the sun; who
pant in darkness, and wear their breasts bare beating on the iron that
will never yield; who know their strength, yet cannot break their
prison; who feel their wings, yet never can soar up to meet the sweet
wild western winds of liberty; who lie at last beaten, and hopeless, and
blind, with only strength enough to long for death to come and quench
all sense and thought in its annihilation,--who thinks of them--who
counts them?
* * *
The earliest dawn had broken eastward, where the mountains
stretched--the dawn of a southern summer, that almost touches the sunset
of the past night--but under the dense shadows of the old woods that had
sheltered the mystic rites of Gnostics and echoed with the Latin hymns
to Pan, no light wandered. There was only a dim silvery haze that seemed
to float over the whiteness of the tall-stemmed arum lilies and the
foam-bells of the water that here and there glimmered under the rank
vegetation, where it had broken from its hidden channels up to air and
space. Not a sound disturbed the intense stillness; that the night waned
and the world wakened, brought no change to the solitudes that men had
forgotten, and only memories of dead-deserted gods still haunted in the
places of their lost temples, whose columns were now the sea-pines'
stems, and on whose fallen altars and whose shattered sculptures the
lizard made her shelter and the wind-sown grasses seeded and took root.
Of the once graceful marble beauty and the incense-steeped stones of
sacrifice nothing remained but moss-grown shapeless fragments, buried
beneath a pall of leaves by twice a thousand autumns. Yet the ancient
sanctity still rested on the nameless, pathless woods; the breath of an
earlier time, of a younger season of the earth, seemed to lie yet upon
the untroubled forest ways; the whisper of the unseen waters had a
dream-like, unreal cadence; in the deep shade, in the warm fragrance and
the heavy gloom, there was a voluptuous yet mournful charm--the world
seemed so far, the stars shone so near; there were the sweetness of rest
and the oblivion of passion.
* * *
Death is not ours to deal. And were it ours, should we give him the
nameless mystic mercy which all men live to crave--give it as the
chastisement of crime? Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to
the atheist, it is immortality to the poet! It is a vast, dim,
exhaustless pity to all the world. And would you summon it as your
hardest cruelty to sin?
They were silent; she stirred their souls--she had not bound their
passions.
"A traitor merits death," they muttered.
"Merits it! Not so. The martyr, the liberator, the seeker of truth, may
deserve its peace; how has the traitor won them? You deem yourselves
just; your justice errs. If you would give him justice, make him live.
Live to know fear lest every wind among the leaves may whisper of his
secret; live to feel the look of a young child's eyes a shame to him;
live to envy every peasant whose bread has not been bought with tainted
coin; live to hear ever in his path the stealing step of haunting
retribution; live to see his brethren pass by him as a thing accurst;
live to listen in his age to white-haired men, who once had been his
comrades, tell to the youth about them the unforgotten story of his
shame. Make him live thus if you would have justice."
They answered nothing; a shudder ran through them as they heard.
"And--if you have as I--a deliverance that forbids you even so much
harshness, still let him live, and bury his transgression in your
hearts. Say to him as I say, 'Your sin was great, go forth and sin no
more.'"
* * *
"One is not an assassin!"
"Since when have you discovered that?"
The flush grew darker on Count Conrad's forehead; he moved restlessly
under the irony, and drank down a draught of red fiery Roussillon
without tasting it more than if it had been water. Then he laughed; the
same careless musical laughter with which he had made the requiem over a
violet--a laugh which belonged at once to the most careless and the most
evil side of his character.
"Since sophism came in, which was with Monsieur Cain, when he asked, 'Am
I my brother's keeper?' It was ingenious that reply; creditable to a
beginner, without social advantages. 'An assassin!' Take the word boldly
by the beard, and look at it. What is there objectionable?"
"Nothing--except to the assassinated."