the rain of fire that overwhelmed Sodom, for the strength which
Samson possessed when he pulled down the columns in the house of the
Philistines. They prayed with song and with words; they denuded their
shoulders and prayed with their scourges. They lay kneeling row after
row, stripped to their waist, and swung the sharp-pointed and knotted
cords down on their bleeding backs. Wildly and madly they beat
themselves so that the blood clung in drops on their hissing whips.
Every blow was a sacrifice to God. Would that they might beat themselves
in still another way, would that they might tear themselves into a
thousand bloody shreds here before His eyes! This body with which
they had sinned against His commandments had to be punished, tortured,
annihilated, that He might see how hateful it was to them, that He might
see how they became like unto dogs in order to please Him, lower than
dogs before His will, the lowliest of vermin that ate the dust beneath
the soles of His feet! Blow upon blow--until their arms dropped or
until cramps turned them to knots. There they lay row on row with eyes
gleaming with madness, with foam round their mouths, the blood trickling
down their flesh.
And those who watched this suddenly felt their hearts throb, noticed how
hotness rose into their cheeks and how their breathing grew difficult.
It seemed as if something cold was growing out beneath their scalps,
and their knees grew weak. It seized hold of them; in their brains was a
little spot of madness which understood this frenzy.
To feel themselves the slaves of a harsh and powerful deity, to thrust
themselves down before His feet; to be His, not in gentle piety, not
in the inactivity of silent prayer, but madly, in a frenzy of
self-humiliation, in blood, and wailing, beneath wet gleaming
scourges--this they were capable of understanding. Even the butcher
became silent, and the toothless philosophers lowered their gray heads
before the eyes that roved about.
And it became quite still within the church; only a slight wave-like
motion swept through the mob.
Then one from among the strangers, a young monk, rose up and spoke. He
was pale as a sheet of linen, his black eyes glowed like coals, which
are just going to die out, and the gloomy, pain-hardened lines around
his mouth were as if carven in wood with a knife, and not like the folds
in the face of a human being.
He raised his thin, sickly hands toward heaven in prayer, and the
sleeves of his robe slipped down over his lean, white arms.
Then he spoke.
Of hell he spoke, that it is infinite as heaven is infinite, of the
lonely world of torments which each one of the condemned must endure and
fill with his wails. Seas of sulphur were there, fields of scorpions,
flames that wrap themselves round a person like a cloak, and silent
flames that have hardened and plunged into the body like a spear twisted
round in a wound.
It was quite still; breathlessly they listened to his words, for he
spoke as if he had seen it with his own eyes, and they asked themselves:
is he one of the condemned, sent up to us from the caverns of hell to
bear witness before us?
Then he preached for a long time concerning the law and the power of
the law, that its every title must be fulfilled, and that every
transgression of which they were guilty would be counted against them
by grain and ounce. “But Christ died for our sins, say ye, and we are no
longer subject to the law. But I say unto you, hell will not be cheated
of a single one of you, and not a single iron tooth of the torture
wheel of hell shall pass beside your flesh. You build upon the cross of
Golgotha, come, come! Come and look at it! I shall lead you straight to
its foot. It was on a Friday, as you know, that they thrust Him out
of one of their gates and laid the heavier end of a cross upon His
shoulders. They made Him bear it to a barren and unfruitful hill without
the city, and in crowds they followed Him, whirling up the dust with
their many feet so that it seemed a red cloud was over the place. And
they tore the garments from Him and bared His body, as the lords of the
law have a malefactor exposed before the eyes of all, so that all may
see the flesh that is to be committed to torture. And they flung Him on
the cross and stretched Him out and they drove a nail of iron through
each of His resistant hands and a nail through His crossed feet. With
clubs they struck the nails till they were in to the heads. And they
raised upright the cross in a hole in the ground, but it would not stand
firm and straight, and they moved it from one side to the other, and
drove wedges and posts all around, and those who did this pulled down
the brims of their hats so that the blood from His hands might not drop
into their eyes. And He on the cross looked down on the soldiers, who
were casting lots for His unstitched garment and down on the whole
turbulent mob, for whose sake He suffered, that they might be saved; and
in all the multitude there was not one pitiful eye.
“And those below looked up toward Him, who hung there suffering and
weak; they looked at the tablet above His head, whereon was written
‘King of the Jews,’ and they reviled Him and called out to Him: ‘Thou
that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself.
If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.’ Then He, the only
begotten Son of God was taken with anger, and saw that they were not
worthy of salvation, these mobs that fill the earth. He tore free His
feet over the heads of the nails, and He clenched His hands round the
nails and tore them out, so that the arms of the cross bent like a bow.
Then He leaped down upon the earth and snatched up His garment so that
the dice rolled down the slope of Golgotha, and flung it round himself
with the wrath of a king and ascended into heaven. And the cross stood
empty, and the great work of redemption was never fulfilled. There is
no mediator between God and us; there is no Jesus who died for us on the
cross; there is no Jesus who died for us on the cross, there is no Jesus
who died for us on the cross!”
He was silent.
As he uttered the last words he leaned forward over the multitude and
with his lips and hands hurled the last words over their heads. A groan
of agony went through the church, and in the corners they had begun to
sob.
Then the butcher pushed forward with raised, threatening hands, pale
as a corpse, and shouted: “Monk, monk, you must nail Him on the cross
again, you must!” and behind him there was a hoarse, hissing sound:
“Yea, yea, crucify, crucify Him!” And from all mouths, threatening,
beseeching, peremptory, rose a storm of cries up to the vaulted roof:
“Crucify, crucify Him!”
And clear and serene a single quivering voice: “Crucify Him!”
But the monk looked down over this wave of outstretched hands, upon
these distorted faces with the dark openings of screaming lips, where
rows of teeth gleamed white like the teeth of enraged beasts of prey,
and in a moment of ecstasy he spread out his arms toward heaven and
laughed. Then he stepped down, and his people raised their banners with
the rain of fire and their empty black crosses, and crowded their way
out of the church and again passed singing across the square and again
through the opening of the tower-gate.
And those of Old Bergamo stared after them, as they went down the
mountain. The steep road, lined by walls, was misty in the light of the
sun setting beyond the plain, but on the red wall encircling the city
the shadows of the great crosses which swayed from side to side in the
crowd stood out black and sharply outlined.
Further away sounded the singing; one or another of the banners still
gleamed red out of the new town’s smoke-blackened void; then they
disappeared in the sun-lit plain.
THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN ROSES
There should have been roses
Of the large, pale yellow ones.
And they should hang in abundant clusters over the garden-wall,
scattering their tender leaves carelessly down into the wagon-tracks on
the road: a distinguished glimmer of all the exuberant wealth of flowers
within.
And they should have the delicate, fleeting fragrance of roses, which
cannot be seized and is like that of unknown fruits of which the senses
tell legends in their dreams.
Or should they have been red, the roses?
Perhaps.
They might be of the small, round, hardy roses, and they would have to
hang down in slender twining branches with smooth leaves, red and fresh,
and like a salutation or a kiss thrown to the wanderer, who is walking,
tired and dusty, in the middle of the road, glad that he now is only
half a mile from Rome.
Of what may he be thinking? What may be his life?
And now the houses hide him, they hide everything on that side. They
hide one another and the road and the city, but on the other side there
is still a distant view. There the road swings in an indolent, slow
curve down toward the river, down toward the mournful bridge. And behind
this lies the immense Campagna. The gray and the green of such large
plains.... It is as if the weariness of many tedious miles rose out of
them and settled with a heavy weight upon one, and made one feel lonely
and forsaken, and filled one with desires and yearning. So it is much
better that one should take one’s ease here in a corner between high
garden-walls, where the air lies tepid and soft and still--to sit on the
sunny side, where a bench curves into a niche of the wall, to sit there
end gaze upon the shimmering green acanthus in the roadside ditches,
upon the silver-spotted thistles, and the pale-yellow autumn flowers.
The roses should have been on the long gray wall opposite, a wall full
of lizard holes and chinks with withered grass; and they should have
peeped out at the very spot where the long, monotonous flatness is
broken by a large, swelling basket of beautiful old wrought iron, a
latticed extension, which forms a spacious balcony, reaching higher than
the breast. It must have been refreshing to go up there when one was
weary of the enclosed garden.
And this they often were.
They hated the magnificent old villa, which is said to be within, with
its marble stair-cases and its tapestries of coarse weave; and the
ancient trees with their proud large crowns, pines and laurels, ashes,
cypresses, and oaks. During all the period of their growth they were
hated with the hatred which restless hearts feel for that which is
commonplace, trivial, uneventful, for that which stands still and
therefore seems hostile.
But from the balcony one could at least range outside with one’s eyes,
and that is why they stood there, one generation after the other, and
all stared into the distance, each one with pro and each one with his
con. Arms adorned with golden bracelets have lain on the edge of the
iron railing and many a silk-covered knee has pressed against the black
arabesques, the while colored ribbons waved from all its points as
signals of love and rendezvous. Heavy, pregnant housewives have also
stood here and sent impossible messages out into the distance. Large,
opulent, deserted women, pale as hatred... could one but kill with a
thought or open hell with a wish!... Women and men! It is always women
and men, even these emaciated white virgin souls which press against the
black latticework like a flock of lost doves and cry out, “Take us!” to
imagined, noble birds of prey.
One might imagine a _proverbe_ here.
The scenery would be very suitable for a _proverbe_.
The wall there, just as it is; only the road would have to be wider and
expand into a circular space. In its center there would have to be
an old, modest fountain of yellowish tuff and with a bowl of broken
porphyry. As figure for the fountain a dolphin with a broken-off tail,
and one of the nostrils stopped up. From the other the fine jet of water
rises. On one side of the fountain a semicircular bench of tuff and
terracotta.
The loose, grayish white dust; the reddish, molded stone, the hewn,
yellowish, porous tuff; the dark, polished porphyry, gleaming with
moisture, and the living, tiny, silvery jet of water: material and
colors harmonize rather well.
The characters: two pages.
Not of a definite, historical period, for the pages of reality in no
way correspond with the pages of the ideal. The pages here, however, are
pages such as dream in pictures and books. Accordingly it is merely the
costume which has a historical effect.
The actress who is to represent the youngest of the pages wears thin
silk which clings closely and is pale-blue, and has heraldic lilies of
the palest gold woven into it. This and as much lace as can possibly be
employed are the most distinctive feature of the costume. It does
not aim at any definite century, but seeks to emphasize the youthful
voluptuousness of the figure, the magnificent blond hair, and the clear
complexion.
She is married, but it lasted only a year and a half, when she was
divorced from her husband, and she is said to have acted in anything but
a proper fashion towards him. And that may well be, but it is impossible
to imagine anything more innocent in appearance than she. That is
to say, it is not the gracious elemental innocence which has such
attractive qualities; but it is rather the cultivated, mature innocence,
in which no one can be mistaken, and which goes straight to the heart.
It captivates one with all the power which something that has reached
completion only can have.
The second actress in the _proverbe_ is slender and melancholy. She is
unmarried and has no past, absolutely none. There is no one who knows
the least thing about her. Yet these finely delineated, almost lean
limbs, and these amber-pale, regular features are vocal. The face is
shaded by raven-black curls, and borne on a strong masculine neck. Its
mocking smile, in which there is also hungry desire, allures. The eyes
are unfathomable and their depths are as soft and luminous as the dark
petals in the flower of the pansy.
The costume is of pale-yellow, in the manner of a corselet with wide,
up-and-down stripes, a stiff ruff and buttons of topaz. There is
a narrow frilled stripe on the edge of the collar, and also on the
close-fitting sleeves. The trunks are short, wide-slashed, and of
a dead-green color with pale purple in the slashes. The hose is
gray.--Those of the blue page, of course, are pure white.--Both wear
barrets.
Such is their appearance.
And now the yellow one is standing up on the balcony, leaning over the
edge, the while the blue is sitting on the bench down by the fountain,
comfortably leaning back, with his ring-covered hands clasped around one
knee. He stares dreamily out upon the Campagna.
Now he speaks:
“No, nothing exists in the world but women!--I don’t understand it...
there must be a magic in the lines out of which they are created, merely
when I see them pass: Isaura, Rosamond, and Donna Lisa, and the others.
When I see how their garment clings around their figure and how it
drapes as they walk, it is as if my heart drank the blood out of all
my arteries, and left my head empty and without thoughts and my limbs
trembling and without strength. It is as though my whole being were
gathered into a single, tremulous, uneasy breath of desire. What is it?
Why is it? It is as if happiness went invisibly past my door, and I
had to snatch it and hold it close, and make it my own. It is so
wonderful--and yet I cannot seize it, for I cannot see it.”
Then the other page speaks from his balcony:
“And if now you sat at her feet, Lorenzo, and lost in her thoughts she
had forgotten why she had called you, and you sat silent and waiting,
and her lovely face were bent over you further from you in the clouds of
its dreams than the star in the heavens, and yet so near you that every
expression was surrendered to your admiration, every beauty-engendered
line, every tint of the skin in its white stillness as well as in its
soft rosy glow--would it not then be as if she who is sitting there
belonged to another world than the one in which you kneel in adoration!
Would it not be as if hers were another world, as if another world
surrounded her, in which her festively garbed thoughts are going out to
meet some goal which is unknown to you? Her love is far away from all
that is yours, from your world, from everything. She dreams of far
distances and her desires are of far distances. And it seems as if not
the slightest space could be found for you in her thoughts, however
ardently you might desire to sacrifice yourself for her, your life, your
all, to the end that that might be between her and you which is hardly a
faint glimmer of companionship, much less a belonging together.”
“Yes, you know that it is thus. But....” Now a greenish-yellow lizard
runs along the edge of the balcony. It stops and looks about The tail
moves....
If one could only find a stone...
Look out, my four-legged friend.
No, you cannot hit them, they hear the stone long before it reaches
them. Anyhow he got frightened.
But the pages disappeared at the same moment.
The blue one had been sitting there so prettily. And in her eyes lay
a yearning which was genuine and unconscious and in her movements a
nervousness that was full of presentiment. Around her mouth was a faint
expression of pain, when she spoke, and even more when she listened to
the soft, somewhat low voice of the yellow page, which spoke to her
from the balcony in words that were provocative and at the same time
caressing, that had a note of mockery and a note of sympathy.
And doesn’t it seem now as if both were still here!
They are there, and have carried on the action of the _proverbe_, while
they were gone. They have spoken of that vague young love which never
finds peace but unceasingly flits through all the lands of foreboding
and through all the heavens of hope; this love that is dying to satisfy
itself in the powerful, fervent glow of a single great emotion! Of this
they spoke; the younger one in bitter complaint, the elder one with
regretful tenderness. Now the latter said--the yellow one to the
blue--that he should not so impatiently demand the love of a woman to
capture him and hold him bound.
“For believe me,” he said, “the love that you will find in the clasp of
two white arms, with two eyes as your immediate heaven and the certain
bliss of two lips--this love lies nigh unto the earth and unto the dust.
It has exchanged the eternal freedom of dreams for a happiness which is
measured by hours and which hourly grows older. For even if it always
grows young again, yet each time it loses one of the rays which in a
halo surround the eternal youth of dreams. No, you are happy.”
“No, you are happy,” answered the blue one, “I would give a world, were
I as you are.”
And the blue one rises, and begins to walk down the road to the
Campagna, and the yellow one looks after him with a sad smile and says
to himself: “No, he is happy!”
But far down the road the blue one turns round once more toward the
balcony, and raising his barret calls: “No, you are happy!”
*****
There should have been roses.
And now a breath of wind might come and shake a rain of rose-leaves from
the laden branches, and whirl them after the departing page.
MRS. FONSS
In the graceful pleasure-gardens behind the Pope’s ancient palace
in Avignon stands a bench from which one can overlook the Rhone, the
flowery banks of the Durance, hills and fields, and a part of the town.
One October afternoon two Danish ladies were seated on this bench, Mrs.
Fonss, a widow, and her daughter Elinor.
Although they had been here several days and were already familiar with
the view before them, they nevertheless sat there and marveled that this
was the way the Provence looked.
And this really was the Provence! A clayey river with flakes of muddy
sand, and endless shores of stone-gray gravel; pale-brown fields without
a blade of grass, pale-brown slopes, pale-brown hills and dust-colored
roads, and here and there near the white houses, groups of black trees,
absolutely black bushes and trees. Over all this hung a whitish sky,
quivering with light, which made everything still paler, still dryer and
more wearily light; never a glimmer of luxuriant, satiated hues, nothing
but hungry, sun-parched colors; not a sound in the air, not a scythe
passing through the grass, not a wagon rattling over the roads; and the
town stretching out on both sides was also as if built of silence with
all the streets still as at noon time, with all the houses deaf and
dumb, every shutter closed, every blind drawn, each and every one;
houses that could neither see nor hear.
Mrs. Fonss viewed this lifeless monotony with a resigned smile, but
it made Elinor visibly nervous; not actively nervous as in the case of
annoyance, but mournful and weary, as one often becomes after many days
of rain, when all one’s gloomy thoughts seem to pour down upon one with
the rain; or as at the idiotically consoling tick-tack of a clock, when
one sits and grows incurably tired of one’s self; or at watching the
flowers of the wall-paper, when the same chain of worn-out dreams clanks
about against one’s will in the brain and the links are joined and come
apart and in a stifling endlessness are united again. It actually had a
physical effect upon her, this landscape, almost causing her to faint.
To-day everything seemed to have conspired with the memories of a
hope which was dead and of sweet and lively dreams which had become
disagreeable and nauseous; dreams which caused her to redden when she
thought of them and which yet she could not forget. And what had all
that to do with the region here? The blow had fallen upon her far from
here amid the surroundings of her home, by the edge of a sound with
changing waters, under pale green beech-trees. Yet it hovered on the
lips of every pale brown hill, and every green-shuttered house stood
there and held silence concerning it.
It was the old sorrow for young hearts which had touched her. She had
loved a man and believed in his love for her, and suddenly he had chosen
some one else. Why? For what reason? What had she done to him? Had she
changed? Was she no longer the same? And all the eternal questions over
again. She had not said a word about it to her mother, but her mother
had understood every bit of it, and had been very concerned about her.
She could have screamed at this thoughtfulness which knew and yet should
not have known; her mother understood this also, and for that reason
they had gone traveling.
The whole purpose of the journey was only that she might forget.
Mrs. Fonss did not need to make her daughter feel uneasy by scrutinizing
her face in order to know where her thoughts were. All she had to do
was to watch the nervous little hand which lay beside her and with
such futile despair stroked the bars of the bench; they changed their
position every moment like a fever-patient tossing from side to side in
his hot bed. When she did this and looked at the hand, she also knew how
life-weary the young eyes were that stared out into the distance, how
pain quivered through every feature of the delicate face, how pale it
was beneath its suffering, and how the blue veins showed at the temples
beneath the soft skin.
She was very sorry for her little girl, and would have loved to have had
her lean against her breast, and to whisper down to her all the words of
comfort she could think of, but she had the conviction that there
were sorrows which could only die away in secret and which must not
be expressed in loud words, not even between a mother and daughter.
Otherwise some day under new circumstances, when everything is building
for joy and happiness, these words may become an obstacle, something
that weighs heavily and takes away freedom. The person who has spoken
hears their whisper in the soul of the other, imagines them turned over
and judged in the thoughts of the other.
Then, too, she was afraid of doing injury to her daughter if she made
confidences too easy. She did not wish to have Elinor blush before her;
she did want, however much of a relief it might be, to help her over the
humiliation, which lies in opening the inmost recesses of one’s soul to
the gaze of another. On the contrary the more difficult it became for
both, the more she was pleased, that the aristocracy of soul which
she herself possessed was repeated in her young daughter in a certain
healthy inflexibility.