That night they halted in a little bright village of the leafy and
fruitful zone of the city--one of the fragrant and joyous
pleasure-places among the woods where the students and the young girls
came for draughts of milk and plunder of primroses, and dances by the
light of the spring moon, and love-words murmured as they fastened
violets in each other's breasts.
The next day she entered Paris with them as one of their own people.
"You may be great here, if you choose," they said to her, and laughed.
She scarcely heard. She only knew that here it was that Arslàn had
declared that fame--or death--should come to him.
The golden cloud dissolved as she drew near to it.
A great city might be beautiful to others: to her it was only as its
gilded cage is to a mountain bird. The wilderness of roofs, the
labyrinth of streets, the endless walls of stone, the ceaseless noises
of the living multitude, these were horrible to the free-born blood of
her; she felt blinded, caged, pent, deafened. Its magnificence failed to
daunt, its color to charm, its pageantry to beguile her. Through the
glad and gorgeous ways she went, wearily and sick of heart, for the rush
of free winds and the width of free skies, as a desert-born captive,
with limbs of bronze and the eyes of the lion, went fettered past the
palaces of Rome in the triumphal train of Africanus or Pompeius.
The little band with which she traveled wondered what her eyes so
incessantly looked for, in that perpetual intentness with which they
searched every knot of faces that was gathered together as a swarm of
bees clusters in the sunshine. They could not tell; they only saw that
her eyes never lost that look.
"Is it the Past or the Future that you search for always?" the shrewdest
of them asked her.
She shuddered a little, and made him no answer. How could she tell which
it was?--whether it would be a public fame or a nameless grave that she
would light on at the last?
She was a mystery to them.
She minded poverty so little. She was as content on a draught of water
and a bunch of cress as others are on rarest meats and wines. She bore
bodily fatigue with an Arab's endurance and indifference. She seemed to
care little whether suns beat on her, or storms drenched her to the
bone; whether she slept under a roof or the boughs of a tree; whether
the people hissed her for a foreign thing of foul omen, or clamored
aloud in the streets praise of her perfect face. She cared nothing.
She was silent always, and she never smiled.
"I must keep my liberty!" she had said; and she kept it.
By night she toiled ceaselessly for her new masters; docile, patient,
enduring, laborious, bearing the yoke of this labor as she had borne
that of her former slavery, rather than owe a crust to alms, a coin to
the gaze of a crowd. But by day she searched the city ceaselessly and
alone, wandering, wandering, wandering, always on a quest that was never
ended. For amidst the millions of faces that met her gaze, Arslàn's was
not; and she was too solitary, too ignorant, and locked her secret too
tenaciously in her heart, to be able to learn tidings of his name.
So the months of the spring and the summer time went by; it was very
strange and wondrous to her.
The human world seemed suddenly all about her; the quiet earth, on which
the cattle grazed, and the women threshed and plowed, and the sheep
browsed the thyme, and the mists swept from stream to sea, this was all
gone; and in its stead there was a world of tumult, color, noise,
change, riot, roofs piled on roofs, clouds of dust yellow in the sun,
walls peopled with countless heads of flowers and of women; throngs,
various of hue as garden-beds of blown anemones; endless harmonies and
discords always rung together from silver bells, and brazen trumpets,
and the clash of arms, and the spray of waters, and the screams of
anguish, and the laughs of mirth, and the shrill pipes of an endless
revelry, and the hollow sighs of a woe that had no rest.
For the world of a great city, of "the world as it is man's," was all
about her; and she loathed it, and sickened in it, and hid her face from
it whenever she could, and dreamed, as poets dream in fever of pathless
seas and tawny fields of weeds, and dim woods filled with the song of
birds, and cool skies brooding over a purple moor, and all the silence
and the loveliness and the freedom of "the world as it is God's."
"You are not happy?" one man said to her.
"Happy!"
She said no more; but he thought, just so had he seen a rose-crested
golden-eyed bird of the great savannas look, shut in a cage in a
showman's caravan, and dying slowly, with dulled plumage and drooped
head, while the street mob of a town thrust their fingers through the
bars and mocked it, and called to it to chatter and be gay.
"Show your beauty once--just once amidst us on the stage, and on the
morrow you can choose your riches and your jewels from the four winds of
heaven as you will," the players urged on her a hundred times.
But she refused always.
Her beauty--it was given to the gods, to take or leave, in life or
death, for him.
The months went on; she searched for him always. A horrible, unending
vigil that never seemed nearer its end. Vainly, day by day, she searched
the crowds and the solitudes, the gates of the palaces and the vaults of
the cellars. She thought she saw him a thousand times; but she could
never tell whether it were truth or fancy. She never met him face to
face: she never heard his name. There is no desert wider, no maze more
unending, than a great city.
She ran hideous peril with every moment that she lived; but by the
strength and the love that dwelt together in her she escaped them. Her
sad, wide, open, pathetic eyes searched only for his face and saw no
other; her ear, ever strained to listen for one voice, was dead to every
accent of persuasion or of passion.
When men tried to tell her she was beautiful, she looked them full in
the eyes and laughed, a terrible dreary laugh of scorn that chilled them
to the bone. When the gay groups on balconies, that glanced golden in
the sun, flung sweetmeats at her, and dashed wine on the ground, and
called to her for her beauty's sake to join them, she looked at them
with a look that had neither envy nor repugnance in it, but only a cold
mute weariness of contempt.
One day a great sculptor waylaid her, and showed her a pouch full of
money and precious stones. "All that, and more, you shall have, if you
will let me make a cast of your face and your body once." In answer, she
showed him the edge of her hidden knife.
One day a young man, unlike to all the ragged and toil-worn crowds that
alone beheld her, came in those crowded quarters of the poor, and
watched her with eyes aglow like those of the youth in the old
market-square about the cathedral, and waylaid her, later, in solitude,
and slid in her palm a chain studded with precious stones of many
colors.
"I am rich," he murmured to her. "I am a prince. I can make your name a
name of power, if only you will come."
"Come whither?" she asked him.
"Come with me--only to my supper-table--for one hour; my horses wait."
She threw the chain of stones at her feet.
"I have no hunger," she said, carelessly. "Go, ask those that have to
your feast."
And she gave no other phrase in answer to all the many honeyed and
persuasive words with which in vain he urged her, that night and many
another night, until he wearied.
One day, in the green outskirts of the city, passing by under a gilded
gallery, and a wide window, full of flowers, and hung with delicate
draperies, there looked out the fair head of a woman, with diamonds in
the ears, and a shroud of lace about it, while against the smiling
scornful mouth a jeweled hand held a rose; and a woman's voice called to
her, mockingly:
"Has the devil not heard you yet, that you still walk barefoot in the
dust on the stones, and let the sun beat on your head? O fool! there is
gold in the air, and gold in the dust, and gold in the very gutter here,
for a woman!"
And the face was the face, and the voice the voice, of the gardener's
wife of the old town by the sea.
She raised, to the gilded balcony above, her great sorrowful, musing
eyes, full of startled courage: soon she comprehended; and then her gaze
gave back scorn for scorn.
"Does that brazen scroll shade you better than did the trellised vine?"
she said, with her voice ascending clear in its disdain. "And are those
stones in your breast any brighter than the blue was in the eyes of your
child?"
The woman above cast the rose at her and laughed, and withdrew from the
casement.
She set her heel on the rose, and trod its leaves down in the dust. It
was a yellow rose, scentless and loveless--an emblem of pleasure and
wealth. She left it where it lay, and went onward.
The sweet sins, and all their rich profits, that she might take as
easily as she could have taken the rose from the dust, had no power to
allure her.
The gilded balcony, the velvet couch, the jewels in the ears, the purple
draperies, the ease and the affluence and the joys of the sights and the
senses, these to her were as powerless to move her envy, these to her
seemed as idle as the blow-balls that a child's breath floated down the
current of a summer breeze.
When once a human ear has heard the whispers of the gods by night steal
through the reeds by the river, never again to it can there sound
anything but discord and empty sound in the tinkling cymbals of brass,
and the fools' bells of silver, in which the crowds in their deafness
imagine the songs of the heroes and the music of the spheres.
"There are only two trades in a city," said the actors to her, with a
smile as bitter as her own, "only two trades--to buy souls and to sell
them. What business have you here, who do neither the one nor the
other?"
There was music still in this trampled reed of the river, into which the
gods had once bidden the stray winds and the wandering waters breathe
their melody; but there, in the press, the buyers and sellers only saw
in it a frail thing of the sand and the stream, only made to be woven
for barter, or bind together the sheaves of the roses of pleasure.
By-and-by they grew so impatient of this soul which knew its right
errand so little that it would neither accept temptation itself nor deal
it to others, they grew so impatient to receive that golden guerdon from
passion and evil which they had foreseen as their sure wage for her
when they had drawn her with them to the meshes of the city, that they
betrayed her, stung and driven into treachery by the intolerable
reproach of her continual strength, her continual silence.
They took a heavy price, and betrayed her to the man who had set his
soul upon her beauty, to make it live naked and vile and perfect for all
time in marble. She saved herself by such madness of rage, such fury of
resistance, as the native tigress knows in the glare of the torches or
the bonds of the cords. She smote the sculptor with her knife; a tumult
rose round; voices shouted that he was stabbed; the men who had betrayed
her raised loudest the outcry. In the darkness of a narrow street, and
of a night of tempest, she fled from them, and buried herself in the
dense obscurity which is one of the few privileges of the outcasts.
It was very poor, this quarter where she found refuge; men and women at
the lowest ebb of life gathered there together. There was not much
crime; it was too poor even for that. It was all of that piteous,
hopeless class that is honest, and suffers and keeps silent--so silent
that no one notices when death replaces life.
Here she got leave to dwell a little while in the topmost corner of a
high tower, which rose so high, so high, that the roof of it seemed
almost like the very country itself. It was so still there, and so
fresh, and the clouds seemed so near, and the pigeons flew so close
about it all day long, and at night so trustfully sought their roost
there.
In a nook of it she made her home. It was very old, very desolate, very
barren; yet she could bear it better than she could any lower range of
dwelling. She could see the sunrise and the sunset; she could see the
rain-mists and the planets; she could look down on all the white curl of
the smoke; and she could hear the bells ring with a strange, peculiar
sweetness, striking straight to her ear across the wilderness of roofs.
And then she had the pigeons. They were not much, but they were
something of the old, fresh country life; and now and then they brought
a head of clover, or a spray of grass, in their beaks; and at sight of
it the tears would rush into her eyes, and though it was pain, it was
yet a dearer one than any pleasure that she had.
She maintained herself still without alms, buying her right to live
there, and the little food that sufficed for her, by one of those
offices in which the very poor contrive to employ those still poorer
than themselves.
They slept so heavily, those people who had the weight of twenty hours'
toil, the pangs of hunger, and the chills of cold upon them, whenever
they laid them down, and who would so willingly have slept forever with
any night they laid their heads upon their sacks of rags. But, so long
as they woke at all, they needed to wake with the first note of the
sparrows in the dark.
She, so long used to rise ere ever the first streak of day were seen,
roused scores of them; and in payment they gave her the right to warm
herself at their stove, a handful of their chestnuts, a fragment of
their crust, a little copper piece,--anything that they could afford or
she would consent to take. A woman, who had been the réveilleuse of the
quarter many years, had died; and they were glad of her:--"Her eyes have
no sleep in them," they said; and they found that she never failed.
It was a strange trade--to rise whilst yet for the world it was night,
and go to and fro the dreary courts, up and down the gloom of the
staircases, and in and out the silent chambers, and call all those sons
and daughters of wretchedness from the only peace that their lives knew.
So often she felt so loath to wake them; so often she stood beside the
bundle of straw on which some dreaming creature, sighing and smiling in
her sleep, murmured of her home, and had not the heart rudely to shatter
those mercies of the night.
It was a strange, sad office, to go alone among all those sleepers in
the stillness that came before the dawn, and move from house to house,
from door to door, from bed to bed, with the one little star of her lamp
alone burning.
They were all so poor, so poor, it seemed more cruel than murder only to
call them from their rest to work, and keep alive in them that faculty
of suffering which was all they gained from their humanity.
Her pity for them grew so great that her heart perforce softened to them
also. Those strong men gaunt with famine, those white women with their
starved children on their breasts, those young maidens worn blind over
the needle or the potter's clay, those little children who staggered up
in the dark to go to the furnace, or the wheel, or the powder-mill, or
the potato-fields outside the walls,--she could neither fear them nor
hate them, nor do aught save sorrow for them with a dumb, passionate,
wondering grief.
She saw these people despised for no shame, wretched for no sin,
suffering eternally, though guilty of no other fault than that of being
in too large numbers on an earth too small for the enormous burden of
its endless woe. She found that she had companions in her misery, and
that she was not alone under that bitter scorn which had been poured on
her. In a manner she grew to care for these human creatures, all
strangers, yet whose solitude she entered, and whose rest she roused. It
was a human interest, a human sympathy. It drew her from the despair
that had closed around her.
And some of these in turn loved her.
Neither poverty nor wretchedness could dull the lustrous, deep-hued,
flowerlike beauty that was hers by nature. As she ascended the dark
stone stairs with the little candle raised above her head, and, knocking
low, entered the place where they slept, the men and the children alike
dreamed of strange shapes of paradise and things of sorcery.
"When she wakes us, the children never cry," said a woman whom she
always summoned an hour before dawn to rise and walk two leagues to a
distant factory. It was new to her to be welcomed; it was new to see the
children smile because she touched them. It lifted a little the ice that
had closed about her heart.
It had become the height of the summer. The burning days and the sultry
nights poured down on her bare head and blinded her, and filled her
throat with the dust of the public ways, and parched her mouth with the
thirst of overdriven cattle.
All the while in the hard hot glare she searched for one face. All the
while in the hard brazen din she listened for one voice.
She wandered all the day, half the night. They wondered that she woke so
surely with every dawn; they did not know that seldom did she ever
sleep. She sought for him always;--sought the busy crowds of the living;
sought the burial-grounds of the dead.
As she passed through the endless ways in the wondrous city; as she
passed by the vast temples of art; as she passed by the open doors of
the sacred places which the country had raised to the great memories
that it treasured; it became clearer to her--this thing of his desires,
this deathless name amidst a nation, this throne on the awed homage of a
world for which his life had labored, and striven, and sickened, and
endlessly yearned.
The great purpose, the great end, to which he had lived grew tangible
and present to her; and in her heart, as she went, she said ever, "Let
me only die as the reed died,--what matter,--so that only the world
speak his name!"