Folle-Farine

"But when the morning broke she left him laughing, gliding like a phantom from his arms, and out into the red sunlight, and across the desert sand, laughing, laughing, always, and mocking him whilst she beckoned. He pursued her, chasing her through the dawn, through the noon, through the night. He never found her; she had vanished as the rose of the rainbow fades out of the sky.

"He searched for her in every city, and in every land. Some say he searches still, doomed to live on through every age and powerless to die."

He had a certain power over words as over color. Like all true painters, the fiber of his mind was sensuous and poetic, though the quality of passionate imagination was in him welded with a coldness and a stillness of temper born in him with his northern blood. He had dwelt much in the Asiatic countries, and much of the philosophies and much of the phraseology of the East remained with him. Something even there seemed in him of the mingled asceticism and sensualism, the severe self-denial, with the voluptuous fancy of the saints who once had peopled the deserts in which he had in turn delighted to dwell, free and lonely, scorning women and deserting men. He spoke seldom, being by nature silent; but when he did speak, his language was unconsciously varied into picture-like formations.

She listened breathless, with the color in her cheeks and the fire brooding in her eyes, her unformed mind catching the swift shadowy allegories of his tale by force of the poetic instincts in her.

No one had ever talked to her thus; and yet it seemed clear to her and beautiful, like the story that the great sunflowers told as they swayed to and fro in the light, like the song that the bright brook-water sung as it purred and sparkled under the boughs.

"That is true?" she said, suddenly, at length.

"It is a saint's story in substance; it is true in spirit for all time."

Her breath came with a sharp, swift, panting sound. She was blinded with the new light that broke in on her.

"If I be a woman, shall I, then, be such a woman as that?"

Arslàn rested his eyes on her with a grave, half-sad, half-sardonic smile.

"Why not? You are the devil's daughter, you say. Of such are men's kingdom of heaven!"

She pondered long upon his answer; she could not comprehend it; she had understood the parable of his narrative, yet the passion of it had passed by her, and the evil shut in it had escaped her.

"Do, then, men love what destroys them?" she asked, slowly.

"Always!" he made answer, still with that same smile as of one who remembers hearkening to the delirious ravings round him in a madhouse through which he has walked—himself sane—in a bygone time.

"I do not want love," she said, suddenly, while her brain, half strong, half feeble, struggled to fit her thoughts to words. "I want—I want to have power, as the priest has on the people when he says, 'Pray!' and they pray."

"Power!" he echoed, as the devotee echoes the name of his god. "Who does not? But do you think the woman that tempted the saint had none? If ever you reach that kingdom such power will become yours."

A proud glad exultation swept over her face for a moment. It quickly faded. She did not believe in a future. How many times had she not, since the hand of Claudis Flamma first struck her, prayed with all the passion of a child's dumb agony that the dominion of her Father's power might come to her? And the great Evil had never hearkened. He, whom all men around her feared, had made her no sign that he heard, but left her to blows, to solitude, to continual hunger, to perpetual toil.

"I have prayed to the devil again and again and he will not hear," she muttered. "Marcellin says that he has ears for all. But for me he has none."

"He has too much to do to hear all. All the nations of the earth beseech him. Yonder man on the cross they adjure with their mouths indeed; but it is your god only whom in their hearts they worship. See how the Christ hangs his head: he is so weary of lip service."

"But since they give the Christ so many temples, why do they raise none to the devil?"

"Chut! No man builds altars to his secret god. Look you: I will tell you another story: once, in an Eastern land, there was a temple dedicated to all the various deities of all the peoples that worshiped under the sun. There were many statues and rare ones; statues of silver and gold, of ivory, and agate, and chalcedony, and there were altars raised before all, on which every nation offered up sacrifice and burned incense before its divinity.

"Now, no nation would look at the god of another; and each people clustered about the feet of its own fetich, and glorified it, crying out, 'There is no god but this god.'

"The noise was fearful, and the feuds were many, and the poor king, whose thought it had been to erect such a temple, was confounded, and very sorrowful, and murmured, saying, 'I dreamed to beget universal peace and tolerance and harmony; and lo! there come of my thought nothing but discord and war.'

"Then to him there came a stranger, veiled, and claiming no country, and he said, 'You were mad to dream religion could ever be peace, yet, be not disquieted; give me but a little place and I will erect an altar whereat all men shall worship, leaving their own gods.'

"The king gave him permission; and he raised up a simple stone, and on it he wrote, 'To the Secret Sin!' and, being a sorcerer, he wrote with a curious power, that showed the inscription to the sight of each man, but blinded him whilst he gazed on it to all sight of his fellows.

"And each man forsook his god, and came and kneeled before this nameless altar, each bowing down before it, and each believing himself in solitude. The poor forsaken gods stood naked and alone; there was not one man left to worship one of them."

She listened; her eloquent eyes fixed on him, her lips parted, her fancy fantastic and full of dreams, strengthened by loneliness, and unbridled through ignorance, steeping itself in every irony and every fantasy, and every shred of knowledge that Chance; her only teacher, cast to her.

She sat thinking, full of a vague sad pity for that denied and forsaken God on the cross, by the river, such as she had never felt before, since she had always regarded him as the symbol of cruelty, of famine, and of hatred; not knowing that these are only the colors which all deities alike reflect from the hearts of the peoples that worship them.

"If I had a god," she said, suddenly, "if a god cared to claim me—I would be proud of his worship everywhere."

Arslàn smiled.

"All women have a god; that is why they are at once so much weaker and so much happier than men."

"Who are their gods?"

"Their name is legion. Innocent women make gods of their offspring, of their homes, of their housework, of their duties; and are as cruel as tigresses meanwhile to all outside the pale of their temples. Others—less innocent—make gods of their own forms and faces; of bright stones dug from the earth, of vessels of gold and silver, of purple and fine linen, of passions, and vanities, and desires; gods that they consume themselves for in their youth, and that they curse, and beat, and upbraid in the days of their age. Which of these gods will be yours?"

She thought awhile.

"None of them," she said at last.

"None? What will you put in their stead, then?"

She thought gravely some moments again. Although a certain terse and even poetic utterance was the shape which her spoken imaginations naturally took at all times, ignorance and solitude had made it hard for her aptly to marry her thoughts to words.

"I do not know," she said, wearily. "Marcellin says that 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. Its God never heard. When I got 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 all gods let 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."

She did not understand him; but she felt that she was honored by him, and not scorned as others scorned her, for being thus unlike humanity. It was a bitter perplexity to her, this earth on which she had been flung amidst an alien people; that she should suffer herself seemed little to her, it had become as a second nature; but the sufferings of all the innumerable tribes of creation, things of the woods, and the field, and the waters, and the sky, that toiled and sweated and were hunted, and persecuted and wrenched in torment, and finally perished to gratify the appetites or the avarice of humanity—these sufferings were horrible to her always: inexplicable, hideous, unpardonable,—a crime for which she hated God and Man.

"There is no god pitiful, then?" she said, at length; "no god—not one?"

"Only those Three," he answered her as he motioned towards the three brethren that watched above her.

"Are they your gods?"

A smile that moved her to a certain fear of him passed a moment over his mouth.

"My gods?—No. They are the gods of youth and of age—not of manhood."

"What is yours, then?"

"Mine?—a Moloch who consumes my offspring, yet in whose burning brazen hands I have put them and myself—forever."

She looked at him in awe and in reverence. She imagined him the priest of some dark and terrible religion, for whose sake he passed his years in solitude and deprivation, and by whose powers he created the wondrous shapes that rose and bloomed around him.

"Those are gentler gods?" she said, timidly, raising her eyes to the brethren above her. "Do you never—will you never—worship them?"

"I have ceased to worship them. In time—when the world has utterly beaten me—no doubt I shall pray to one at least of them. To that one, see, the eldest of the brethren, who holds his torch turned downward."

"And that god is–"

"Death!"

She was silent.

Was this god not her god also? Had she not chosen him from all the rest and cast her life down at his feet for this man's sake?

"He must never know, he must never know," she said again in her heart.

And Thanatos she knew would not betray her; for Thanatos keeps all the secrets of men,—he who alone of all the gods reads the truths of men's souls, and smiles and shuts them in the hollow of his hand, and lets the braggart Time fly on with careless feet above a million graves, telling what lies he will to please the world a little space. Thanatos holds silence, and can wait; for him must all things ripen and to him must all things fall at last.

CHAPTER V

When she left him that night, and went homeward, he trimmed his lamp and returned to his labors of casting and modeling from the body of the ragpicker's daughter. The work soon absorbed him too entirely to leave any memory with him of the living woman. He did not know—and had he known would not have heeded—that instead of going on her straight path back to Yprès she turned again, and, hidden among the rushes upon the bank, crouched, half sitting and half kneeling, to watch him from the riverside.

It was all dark and still without; nothing came near, except now and then some hobbled mule turned out to forage for his evening meal or some night-browsing cattle straying out of bounds. Once or twice a barge went slowly and sullenly by, its single light twinkling across the breadth of the stream, and the voices of its steersman calling huskily through the fog. A drunken peasant staggered across the fields singing snatches of a republican march that broke roughly on the silence of the night. The young lambs bleated to their mothers in the meadows, and the bells of the old clock towers in the town chimed the quarters with a Laus Deo in which all their metal tongues joined musically.

She remained there undisturbed among the long grasses and the tufts of the reeds, gazing always into the dimly-lighted interior where the pale rays of the oil flame lit up the white forms of the gods, the black shadows of the columns, the shapes of the wrestling lion and the strangled gladiator, the gray stiff frame and hanging hair of the dead body, and the bending figure of Arslàn as he stooped above the corpse and pursued the secret powers of his art into the hidden things of death.

To her there seemed nothing terrible in a night thus spent, in a vigil thus ghastly; it seemed to her only a part of his strength thus to make death—men's conqueror—his servant and his slave; she only begrudged every passionless touch that his grasp gave to those frozen and rigid limbs which he moved to and fro like so much clay; she only envied with a jealous thirst every cold caress that his hand lent to that loose and lifeless hair which he swept aside like so much flax.

He did not see; he did not know. To him she was no more than any bronze-winged, golden-eyed insect that should have floated in on a night breeze and been painted by him and been cast out again upon the darkness.

He worked more than half the night—worked until the small store of oil he possessed burned itself out, and left the hall to the feeble light of a young moon shining through dense vapors. He dropped his tools, and rose and walked to and fro on the width of the great stone floor. His hands felt chilled to the bone with the contact of the dead flesh; his breathing felt oppressed with the heavy humid air that lay like ice upon his lungs.

The dead woman was nothing to him. He had not once thought of the youth that had perished in her; of the laughter that hunger had hushed forever on the colorless lips; of the passion blushes that had died out forever on the ashen cheeks; of the caressing hands of mother and of lover that must have wandered among that curling hair; of the children that should have slept on that white breast so smooth and cold beneath his hand. For these he cared nothing, and thought as little. The dead girl for him had neither sex nor story; and he had studied all phases and forms of death too long to be otherwise than familiar with them all. Yet a certain glacial despair froze his heart as he left her body lying there in the flicker of the struggling moonbeams, and, himself, pacing to and fro in his solitude, suffered a greater bitterness than death in his doom of poverty and of obscurity.

The years of his youth had gone in fruitless labor, and the years of his manhood were gliding after them, and yet he had failed so utterly to make his mark upon his generation that he could only maintain his life by the common toil of the common hand-laborer, and, if he died on the morrow, there would not be one hand stretched out to save any one work of his creation from the housewife's fires or the lime-burner's furnace.

Cold to himself as to all others, he said bitterly in his soul, "What is Failure except Feebleness? And what is it to miss one's mark except to aim wildly and weakly?"

He told himself that harsh and inexorable truth a score of times, again and again, as he walked backward and forward in the solitude which only that one dead woman shared.

He told himself that he was a madman, a fool, who spent his lifetime in search and worship of a vain eidolon. He told himself that there must be in him some radical weakness, some inalienable fault, that he could not in all these years find strength enough to compel the world of men to honor him. Agony overcame him as he thought and thought and thought, until he scorned himself; the supreme agony of a strong nature that for once mistrusts itself as feebleness, of a great genius that for once despairs of itself as self-deception.

Had he been the fool of his vanities all his youth upward; and had his fellow-men been only wise and clear of sight when they had denied him and refused to see excellence in any work of his hand? Almost, he told himself, it must be so.

He paused by the open casement, and looked outward, scarcely knowing what he did. The mists were heavy; the air was loaded with damp exhalations; the country was profoundly still; above-head only a few stars glimmered here and there through the haze. The peace, the silence, the obscurity were abhorrent to him; they seemed to close upon him, and imprison him; far away were the lands and the cities of men that he had known, far away were all the color and the strength and the strain and the glory of living; it seemed to him as though he were dead also, like the woman on the trestle yonder; dead in some deep sea-grave where the weight of the waters kept him down and held his hands powerless, and shut his eyelids from all sight, while the living voices and the living footsteps of men came dimly on his ear from the world above: voices, not one of which uttered his name; footsteps, not one of which paused by his tomb.

It grew horrible to him—this death in life, to which in the freshness of manhood he found himself condemned.

"Oh, God!" he, who believed in no God, muttered half aloud, "let me be without love, wealth, peace, health, gladness, all my life long—let me be crippled, childless, beggared, hated to the latest end of my days. Give me only to be honored in my works; give me only a name that men cannot, if they wish, let die."

Whether any hearer greater than man heard the prayer, who shall say? Daily and nightly, through all the generations of the world, the human creature implores from his Creator the secrets of his existence, and asks in vain. There is one answer indeed; but it is the answer of all the million races of the universe, which only cry, "We are born but to perish; is Humanity a thing so high and pure that it should claim exemption from the universal and inexorable law?"

One mortal listener heard, hidden among the hollow sighing rushes, bathed in the moonlight and the mists; and the impersonal passion which absorbed him found echo in this inarticulate imperfect soul, just wakened in its obscurity to the first faint meanings of its mortal life as a nest-bird rouses in the dawn to the first faint pipe of its involuntary cry.

She barely knew what he sought, what he asked, and yet her heart ached with his desire, and shared the bitterness of his denial. What kind of life he craved in the ages to come; what manner of remembrance he yearned for from unborn races of man; what thing it was that he besought should be given to him in the stead of all love, all peace, all personal woes and physical delights, she did not know; the future to her had no meaning; and the immortal fame that he craved was an unknown god, of whose worship she had no comprehension; and yet she vaguely felt that what he sought was that his genius still should live when his body should be destroyed, and that those mute, motionless, majestic shapes which arose at his bidding should become characters and speak for him to all the generations of men when his own mouth should be sealed dumb in death.

This hunger of the soul which unmanned and tortured him, though the famine of the flesh had had no power to move him, thrilled her with the instinct of its greatness. This thirst of the mind, which could not slake itself in common desire or sensual satiety, or any peace and pleasure of the ordinary life of man, had likeness in it to that dim instinct which had made her nerves throb at the glories of the changing skies, and her eyes fill with tears at the sound of a bird's singing in the darkness of dawn, and her heart yearn with vain nameless longing as for some lost land, for some forgotten home, in the radiant hush of earth and air at sunrise. He suffered as she suffered; and a sweet newborn sense of unity and of likeness stirred in her amidst the bitter pity of her soul. To her he was as a king: and yet he was powerless. To give him power she would have died a thousand deaths.

"The gods gave me life for him," she thought. "His life instead of mine. Will they forget?—Will they forget?"

And where she crouched in the gloom beneath the bulrushes she flung herself down prostrate in supplication, her face buried in the long damp river-grass.

"Oh, Immortals," she implored, in benighted, wistful, passionate faith, "remember to give me his life and take mine. Do what you choose with me; forsake me, kill me; cast my body to fire, and my ashes to the wind; let me be trampled like the dust, and despised as the chaff; let me be bruised, beaten, nameless, hated always; let me always suffer and always be scorned; but grant me this one thing—to give him his desire!"

Unless the gods gave him greatness, she knew that vain would be the gift of life—the gift of mere length of years which she had bought for him.

Her mind had been left blank as a desert, whilst in its solitude dreams had sprung forth windsown, like wayside grasses, and vague desires wandered like wild doves: but although blank, the soil was rich and deep and virgin.

Because she had dwelt sundered from her kind she had learned no evil: a stainless though savage innocence had remained with her. She had been reared in hardship and inured to hunger until such pangs seemed to her scarce worth the counting save perhaps to see if they had been borne with courage and without murmur. On her, profoundly unconscious of the meaning of any common luxury or any common comfort, the passions of natures, more worldly-wise and better aware of the empire of gold, had no hold at any moment. To toil dully and be hungry and thirsty, and fatigued and footsore, had been her daily portion. She knew nothing of the innumerable pleasures and powers that the rich command. She knew scarcely of the existence of the simplest forms of civilization: therefore she knew nothing of all that he missed through poverty; she only perceived, by an unerring instinct of appreciation, all that he gained through genius.

Her mind was profoundly ignorant; her character trained by cruelty only to endurance: yet the soil was not rank but only untilled, not barren but only unsown; nature had made it generous, though fate had left it untilled; it grasped the seed of the first great idea cast to it and held it firm, until it multiplied tenfold.

The imagined danger to them which the peasants had believed to exist in her had been as a strong buckler between the true danger to her from the defilement of their companionship and example. They had cursed her as they had passed, and their curses had been her blessing. Blinded and imprisoned instincts had always moved in her to the great and the good things of which no man had taught her in anywise.

Left to herself, and uncontaminated by humanity, because proscribed by it, she had known no teachers of any sort save the winds and the waters, the sun and the moon, the daybreak and the night, and these had breathed into her an unconscious heroism, a changeless patience, a fearless freedom, a strange tenderness and callousness united. Ignorant though she was, and abandoned to the darkness of all the superstitions and the sullen stupor amidst which her lot was cast, there was yet that in her which led her to veneration of the purpose of his life.

He desired not happiness nor tenderness, nor bodily ease, nor sensual delight, but only this one thing—a name that should not perish from among the memories of men.

And this desire seemed to her sublime, divine; not comprehending it she yet revered it. She, who had seen the souls of the men around her set on a handful of copper coin, a fleece of wool, a load of fruit, a petty pilfering, a small gain in commerce, saw the greatness of a hero's sacrifice in this supreme self-negation which was willing to part with every personal joy and every physical pleasure, so that only the works of his hand might live, and his thoughts be uttered in them when his body should be destroyed.