never had any finite knowledge the certainty of the surgeon’s knife,
which had the power to touch me for the first time with the instinct
of beauty. I am sure I know not whether such was the case; but a pall
was lifted from my brain, a stealthy drug seemed to evaporate out of
my pores. There were times when I lay behind the bars of this prison
in which I could have cried aloud for gladness. The open sores in my
nature began to heal. All those dark mysteries, that had pressed me
down like a curse, were spread out before me luminous with meaning at
those hours when the dawn stole into my cell. Ere long I would lie
awake all night to watch for its appearance, for I knew that every time
it came to me I should gain in knowledge. I began to understand why
the sun was warm, why the birds sang, why the rain was wet. I began to
understand that to breathe, to move, to do, to think, to say ‘yes’ and
‘no,’ to wield despotic powers, to do battle with that underworld, that
reflex action, to which I had always been so ready to succumb, were all
acts of splendor and grace, all parts of a living idea that was a noble
solution of my perplexity.
“As I lay behind the bars of my prison I dreamed again and again
of some mighty and enfolding power that would take the whole of my
trembling irresolution in its arms and bend me into the mould of its
all-powerful will. I foresaw that some young god would emerge out of
those clouds about heaven, which for the first time in my life my
enraptured eyes had perceived, that he would break into my cell, that
he would make me the bride of that majestic loveliness which had caused
my sight to shed its first tears.
“When you came and spoke to me in darkness in the prison I knew who
you were. I knew that my dreams had yielded a reality; and that the
new birth which had unfolded itself in my nature had already found a
shape. From that hour of our meeting I thought no longer of my doom.
Now that such a one had consented to plead for me I knew that none
could do me hurt. Even the dock itself was powerless to touch me with
fear; although until you rose to speak I could neither hear nor see,
and I did not know where I was. But at the first sound of your voice I
sat entranced. I forgot that my wicked and degraded life was in your
hands; I forgot that a subject so foul was the source of your beautiful
words. I had never known before what the living voice of poetry was
like. I had never beheld those heights to which a great and noble
nature is able to aspire.
“As you spoke in the court and all my enemies hung upon your words, you
became a part of this miracle which had happened in myself. You were
the breathing embodiment of those august shapes which emerged in all
their order and beauty from behind the dark curtains of my nature. Hour
by hour, as I listened to the enchantments of your voice, it seemed to
steal over me that you, my deliverer, in the empire of your youth would
not only free me out of prison, but also you would deliver me out of
the bondage of my own soul. Such a tumult of joy came upon me then as
I could not believe could visit any human creature. The music of your
lips was not only the earnest of my dreams, it was the consolation of
my stains.”
When the woman had finished her story she rested her elbows on her
knees and her chin on her hands. Northcote, who had followed so
strange a recital with an interest which its attendant circumstances
even rendered intense, felt no longer able to withhold an ample meed
of pity. And how unfathomable it appeared to him that his defence,
which had been inspired at a time when all was darkness concerning
her, should yet be vindicated so completely by the facts of her life.
Such an intuition was an uncanny weapon. Who could wonder that this
buffeted, arrested, slowly maturing, late-developing creature should
see in its transactions the revelation of a supernatural power?
She was base and foul, yet she was suffused with the inspiration of
his strength--with a strength that had been used in ignorance, with
a sordid end in view. She must indeed engage his pity, she who had
prostrated herself before a chimera, she the thrice unhappy one who had
prostrated herself before an idol with feet of clay.
In looking at her now she had lost half of her strangeness, half of her
mystery. The foulness and ugliness that must recently have been stamped
upon her was now effaced. He could not doubt that since she had been
brought into prison her nature had been sanctified by a new birth. This
squalid criminal whom life had pressed out of the ranks had actually
gained eyes to see and ears to hear. Such a confession was not a
charlatan’s trick; this enkindling experience of the divine beauty was
a true renascence; a cleansing of a fœtid heart by the instinct of joy.
Faith in its childlike naïveté had appeared by some miracle amid that
expanse of corruption. It was as though a violet had raised its head in
a sewer.
Now that the young man had become the witness of the phenomenon that
he himself had wrought he was abashed, yet also he was sensible of
recompense. Not in vain had he suffered those creative pangs by which
so strange a thing was born. Fame and money were the only guerdons
he had sought to compensate his gifts in their highest walk; yet
that travail of the mind, that expenditure of spirit were to receive
emolument more fitting. This wanton, with her crimes and her sores upon
her, whom he had delivered from the last indignity her fellows could
devise, would issue from Gehenna healed and purified into the mellow
light of the afternoon.
Northcote had suffered extreme misgiving throughout that day, but
now as he stood to gaze upon her who was undergoing a resurrection
by the wand of his genius, he felt an exquisite joy in this special
and peculiar gift that heaven had vouchsafed to him. It had wrought
beyond his knowledge. This genie which had derided and tormented him
had achieved an intrinsic glory in allowing itself to be called to the
highest, the most disinterested of human offices. Here was the apologia
for the art he had practised. The black magic in which he had dealt,
the shame of which had stricken him, had actually wrought a divine
miracle. In the light of its sanction he need repine no more.
“It is truly wonderful,” the woman muttered softly as if to herself,
“to live forty years without knowledge and without curiosity, and then
to awake in a night to the seas of color, the harmonies of music that
make the enchantments of the life we have never perceived.”
“You are like a bird,” said the young man, “who has been born in a
cage, yet who contrives at last to break through its bars. It flies
into heaven, mounting rapturously into the void, and it sees the sun,
the tops of the trees, the green fields, the fleecy clouds, and it
tastes the bright air.”
“Yes; and hears for the first time the free and joyous songs of its
kind.”
They seemed to pause to look upon one another with violently beating
hearts: the man in his strength, in his insolent domination; the woman
in her weakness, in her pitiful need.
“Strange, is it not,” said the young advocate, speaking aloud his
thought involuntarily, “that I should not be acquainted with your
history when I made my appeal?”
“Would it have been made had you known all?”
“Indeed, yes,” said Northcote, with a fervor in which he tried to
rejoice; “your baseness is now less in my sight than it then was.”
The fierceness of the woman’s breathing arrested her speech.
“You force me to believe,” she cried in choking accents, “you show me
what faith is, you unfold the meaning of affirmation. Never again can
I be nourished by denial. You are, indeed, the Cloud-dweller who in my
vision I saw break forth out of the stars.”
The sword with which these words pierced the advocate was too sharp for
his fortitude. His wounds of that day had left him faint and spent with
the blood that had flowed from his veins. He grew frail and numb.
“You had better hear the truth,” he said, gasping. “It is the
death-knell of us both, but there is a limit to mortal endurance.
I would have you divorce the instrument from his works. Your
Cloud-dweller is not a god, but even as yourself a thing of dross and
clay.”
“I deny it, I deny it,” said the woman, in a voice of passion.
The man seemed to cower before the anguish of her eyes.
“You owe your deliverance to an unworthy instinct which rendered me
invulnerable.”
“Unworthy, my deliverer!”
“A thousand times unworthy, poor deluded one. It was not for the sake
of the abandoned wretch who was presented to my mind, that I bought her
life and freedom. It was not for her, it was not even for her cause
that I spent the last drop of my power.”
“It was not, then, a divine magnanimity that taught you to forget my
stains?”
“No.”
“It was not that you drew your sword for a marvellous gospel--for a
gospel that dazzled the poor outcast in the dock with its magnificence?”
“No, no.”
“Then why did your voice seem to wail like a flute? Why did you pluck
the back of your hands until the blood flowed from them? Why did you
conclude in a whisper so gentle that it could only be heard by the
spirit?”
“I was in a frenzy of avarice. I was fighting for myself.”
“No, no! Your words were inspired from heaven.”
“No, no! It was no more than the baleful power of the earth. I was
fighting for a roof over my head, regular meals, a reputation, material
needs.”
A thrill passed through the eyes of the woman. They seemed suddenly to
be blinded by a thousand black thoughts she had half-forgotten. She
sprang to her feet, possessed by an excitement that he who had made his
pitiful confession was afraid to plumb. She placed her hands on his
shoulders and peered into his face; and he did not shrink from contact
with her, for by some occult power, which was her own genie, her own
special and peculiar gift, he was disarmed.
“You have the voice, the bearing, of a god,” she said, quivering with
terror, “but your speech belongs to the underworld whence I have come.
Persist in it and we return to it together, walking hand in hand.”
The advocate strove feebly to escape from the demonic faculty which
already had been exerted upon him. She resisted him mournfully.
“You cannot put me off, my deliverer. Henceforward your ways are my
ways. I go with you to the bright fields of your native kingdom, or
I return to the horrors of my own. I beseech you to take me by the
hand and lead me along the golden paths to those mountain fastnesses
in which you were born, in which the sun shines forever. You know how
I have been dreaming that some saint and hero would lead me to them;
you must make my dreams come true again, my deliverer, as you did but
yesterday.”
“Oh, why did you come to me?” cried Northcote weakly, as he strove in
vain to free himself of the yoke that was already on his neck.
He seemed hardly to understand that he had to deal with a desperate
gambler who was staking all upon a final cast.
“Do not let me perish,” cried the woman. “Do not say this is an
illusion upon which I have built my miraculous faith. Do not tell me
that the gods walk the earth no more!”
The tragic distension of her countenance filled the young man with
horror, yet also with a sense of its weird poetry.
“You must not hurl me back into the abyss out of which I have crawled
with bare life,” she cried, seizing his hands with an astounding
passion. “You are the god who has breathed upon the poor outcast who
knows no heaven apart from your nobility; you cannot, you must not,
reject her.”
Again the wretched creature sank down upon her knees before him.
XXXV
DELILAH
As Northcote gazed upon her, despair beat him down like a flail. It was
not for him, man of genius as he was, to heal this outcast with his
touch. Only a perfect chastity could do that; and this was the jewel
with which he had parted two days before to save her from the gallows.
If he touched her now, it would be as the inhabitant of her own level.
She cried for the living god, yet now he was become a counterfeit of
arid clay. She had asked for bread, and he had only a stone to yield.
“You must go,” he said, and the words seemed to thicken as they fell
from his throat. “You must fly from me. I have nothing to offer you.”
The woman shuddered and clasped him by the ankles, but otherwise made
no sign that she had heard.
“My power is gone,” he said. “I am no longer the strong and valiant
one, but the poor outcast even as are you. Two days ago I flung my
birthright away.”
“Will you send me back to the charnel-house?” said the woman with a low
moan.
Northcote drew up his body rigidly, erectly.
“I have no choice,” were the words that were forced from between his
lips.
Vein by vein the creature before him was invaded by death. She crouched
lower and lower upon the ground until she was no more than a shapeless
and ignominious mass on the bare boards in front of the fire. Every
line of her body was merged and outspread into something amorphous,
without form. Her helplessness was too complete to arouse pity. Such a
flaccidity was greater than that of an infant, whose frame is too puny
even to allow it to crawl.
Northcote had no disgust. He had too sharp a sense of horror that the
power should be denied to him to succor such an invertebrate thing.
Presently, by an effort which seemed to shatter her flesh, the creature
was able to move. She rose from her knees, issuing from the state of
coma with all the heavy and desperate pangs of one who attempts to
throw off the fumes of a deadly venom. She rubbed her eyes with the
back of her hands, and folded her arms in front of her.
“If you could have touched me once with the hem of your garment you
would have healed me. As it is, I walk back with my wounds into the
world.”
A singular change had occurred in the voice of the suppliant. It
was far other than that which had clothed the language of entreaty
which had previously fallen from her lips. In the ear of Northcote
the change wrought relief. Yet even as he imbibed this clear, this
definite, this pungent tone with the eagerness of one who presses cold
water to his throat at a time when the pangs of his thirst have become
insupportable, a rapid and bewildering transformation took place in her
who confronted him. She who a minute ago had presented the appearance
of a nebula, suddenly broke out all over into light like a star. Out
of the sprawling shapelessness there was seen to issue something as
strong, graceful, and agile as a leopard. The hue of her skin became
luminous as though a fire had been kindled beneath it; and her eyes,
which so lately had been dull and without nascency, shot forth a lustre
that added light to the room.
There was nothing baleful or malevolent in an apparition so profoundly
wonderful. In standing aside to witness the evolutions of any force,
in the act of obeying the laws by which it is governed, however
inimical its operations may be to our personal safety, the feeling of
repulsion bears no part. The spring of the tiger, the long white teeth
of the wolf, the pinions of the eagle, the motions of the serpent,
are in themselves beautiful, for in them are manifested the free and
unconquerable expression of that force which nature has taken for its
highest gospel. The wide and curving nostrils of the prostitute were
the mansion of a subtle but brutally dominating power.
For the moment, however, Northcote was only aware that a splendid,
supple, and entrancing thing had stolen unperceived, like a beast of
prey, into the room. The strong, fine, and beautiful line that had been
traced along the convergence of the thin but full lips addressed him
like an unexpected but supreme artifice of a great painter, who has
learned to use his pigments with effrontery.
As a revelation of power she was more than his equal; she challenged
him with eyes whose insolent domination exceeded his own. Furtively,
yet boldly, she had discarded her stealthiness; she had already the
strength that disdains a mesh. She looked upon him now with the same
hidden but imperious scornfulness with which he had looked upon the
judge, the jury, and the bar under the excitement his speech on her
behalf had generated. Strong, subtle, and secure as he had been in the
exercise of his specific and audacious talent, this siren was equally
so in hers. He had delivered a great prostitute from the gallows in
order that she might lead him to it.
“I came here with no thought of destroying you,” she said.
With perfect composure she proceeded to divest herself of her hat
and coat, and carried them confidently behind the curtain, as though
already she were perfect mistress of his house. When she returned she
seated herself in the chair against the fire.
Northcote had not protest to raise. He could not meet the challenge
in the eyes of Medusa. In their baleful lustre he had read the abrupt
limit to his own imperious will, he beheld as through a mirage the
prefiguration of his own doom. Even as he had conquered others by the
fearlessness of his own quality, he had himself been conquered by the
fearlessness of hers. He was no common advocate, but this was no common
harlot. Prayer and devotion alone could have saved him from toils such
as these; but of prayer and devotion he no longer commanded the use.
There was a fissure in his armor; and through that aperture, small as
it was, the deadly, unnamable thing that had crawled into his room had
been able to plant its look.
“I am trying to think,” said his visitor, as she reclined in the chair
with her elbows outspread and her hands clasped behind her hair, which
was profuse and ordered with rare precision, “I am trying to think
what it is about you that has caused me to love you. I do not think it
can be your voice altogether, for although when it chooses it can sound
so low and delicious, it can also sound harsh and rude. No, my noble
warrior, I think there is a deeper cause. Is it not that our natures
are alike? Are they not so similar? We are not of the common herd.
We can think, we can feel, we have a little knowledge, and do we not
possess enormous powers of resentment? Life has not been very gentle
with you and me, but we will not complain about it much. Can we not
quietly choose our own weapons and go our own way to work in order that
we may avenge ourselves? It is for your strength and spirit that I love
you. Give me a kiss.”
Northcote obeyed.
She caressed his hands with an extreme tenderness.
“How strong, square, massive, and beautifully ugly they are!” she
exclaimed. “I am sure you could fell a bullock if you doubled your
fist. I love you even for these. I would rather be strangled by strong
hands than I would be fondled by weak ones. If you cared to drive your
fist into the world, you could knock a hole in it and let out a few
of its wrongs. How tall and young and splendid you look. And strength
means bravery.”
Her words, the careless complacency which accompanied them, the ease
of her posture with her head thrown far back in the chair and her eyes
directed steadfastly to Northcote’s face, filled him with a cruel
sensation of pleasure. Knowledge translated into the grace of physical
perfection had an all-conquering attraction for his nature. Every
blemish upon her, and as she lay back in the shadow of the lamp they
appeared surprisingly few, were additions to her value. They were so
many receipted acknowledgments of the heavy sums she had paid for what
she possessed. There was a short but deep scar over one eye. There was
a suggestion of coarseness in her jaw; her bust looked a little too
full.
“What shall I call you?” said the young advocate with shining eyes.
“Shall I call you Diomeda?”
“Do, my beloved Achilles!”
“How do you come to have heard about him? Is it that Greek is
compulsory in the University of the Gutter?”
“Achilles was perfectly familiar to me before I attended it. My dear
father used to tell us stories from Homer when he was drunk.”
“Well, Diomeda, I have come to believe that your father must have been
a very remarkable man.”
“The world will arrive at a similar belief two hundred years hence.
But how can you have acquired such an important piece of information
concerning him when you have never seen one of his works?”
“Do not forget that for the past hour I have been gazing upon his
_chef-d’œuvre_, the masterpiece among his masterpieces.”
“On the contrary, my beloved, you are judging him by his one great
failure. In conception, in design, I have no peer in this time of ours,
but the inspiration of the artist failed suddenly and lamentably
before he could touch me with the magic that would have rendered me
immortal. I am a splendid thing, my beloved, but I shall perish.
Therefore the artist has failed.”
“This is a masculine intellect of yours,” said Northcote, who was
captivated by the celerity with which she had interpreted an idea that
in his own mind had still the nebulosity of recent birth. “Is it usual
to your sex to have such powers?”
“You will confess that you would not say so? Are they not eternally
dunces and fools in the austere eyes of the male?”
“Perhaps I make that confession if you insist upon the measure of my
ignorance.”
“Say rather, my hero, the measure of your inexperience. You see you
have only studied those of my sex who are affiliated to the Great
Trades’ Union. They take eternal vows of foolishness and duncishness
before they are admitted to membership of that sanctified order. But
with us black-legs it is different. We are allowed to know everything.
You may not know that in our University of the Gutter we have the
most learned staff of professors in the world. There is a chair for
everything.”
“Except for honesty. If there was a chair for that, would there not at
once be an end to your intellectual subtlety?”
“You do not know the great university to which I have the honor to
belong if you think intellectual dishonesty is tolerated among us. The
moment we become intellectually dishonest we have done forever with
Alma Mater. She sends us down immediately, and there is nothing for us
then but the river or the Great Trades’ Union.”
“That is what the world would call being ‘sent up.’ Yet if the simplest
terms were not subject to totally different meanings in the varying
strata of our society, we should not have so many of these pretty
paradoxes to subsist upon. But I feel, Diomeda, that I am entitled to
ask you one question. Was it in my capacity as a mentally dishonest
person that you came to me to-night to ask me to arrange for you to be
‘sent down’ from your university?”
“Answer that question to your own liking, beloved one. It was your
appeal on my behalf that brought me here to-night. Would you have me
ask whether you were mentally honest when you made it?”
Her laugh had an edge that cut him like a keen blade. But she was quick
to read the sharp thrill of pain that made his eyes grow dark.
“Do not repine, my beloved Achilles,” she said with a softness that had
the power to caress, “I found you after all to be as honest as I am
myself.”
“At least,” said the young man, sensible that even her lightest
caresses possessed the ferocity of those of the snake and the tiger,
“you are the first of your sex with whom I have conversed who appears
to understand the uses of paradox.”
“There is no other means by which the honest mind can carry on its
thinking.”
“If that is the case, you conduct the thinker to his doom with
atrocious certainty. You conduct him to the gutter.”
“That is true, O Achilles,” said the woman with a quiet laugh.
“In other words,” pursued Northcote, “he demonstrates in his own person
the impossibility of a reconciliation in any terms whatever between the
ideal world of the spirit and the material world of the flesh.”
“Why trouble to put it into so many words, dear lad? Briefly, I am the
child of the poor drunken man of genius, my father; and I suspect that
you had a poor drunken man of genius for your father also.”
“I would have you to know that my father was ordained a clergyman of
the Church of England.”
“How old was he when he died?”
“About thirty.”
“Did it never occur to you that the poor fellow killed himself in the
struggle to become an honest man?”
“These eyes of yours are dreadfully piercing. I remember my mother
saying of him that the clock of his intellect was always set a little
too fast.”
“She never informed you by any chance, dear lad, that if he had not
taken an overdose of opium he would have died a lunatic?”
“Or that he killed himself with drinking brandy after the manner of
your own illustrious parent. By the way, you have yet to give me a
description of your mother. Can you recall her?”