Folle-Farine

It is true that the great artist is as a fallen god who remembers a time when worlds arose at his breath, and at his bidding the barren lands blossomed into fruitfulness; the sorcery of the thyrsus is still his, though weakened.

The powers of lost dominions haunt his memory; the remembered glory of an eternal sun is in his eyes, and makes the light of common day seem darkness; the heart-sickness of a long exile weighs on him; incessantly he labors to overtake the mirage of a loveliness which fades as he pursues it. In the poetic creation by which the bondage of his material life is redeemed, he finds at once ecstasy and disgust, because he feels at once his strength and weakness. For him all things of earth and air, and sea and cloud, have beauty; and to his ear all voices of the forest-land and water-world are audible.

He is as a god, since he can call into palpable shape dreams born of impalpable thought; as a god, since he has known the truth divested of lies, and has stood face to face with it, and been not afraid; a god thus. But a cripple inasmuch as his hand can never fashion the shapes which his vision beholds; and alien because he has lost what he never will find upon earth; a beast, since ever and again his passions will drag him to wallow in the filth of sensual indulgence; a slave, since oftentimes the divinity that is in him breaks and bends under the devilry that also is in him, and he obeys the instincts of vileness, and when he would fain bless the nations he curses them.

Some vague perception of this dawned on her; the sense was in her to feel the beauty of art, and to be awed by it though she could not have told what it was, nor why she cared for it. And the man who ministered to it, who ruled it, and yet obeyed it, seemed to her ennobled with a greatness that was the grandest thing her blank and bitter life had known. This was all wonderful, dreamful, awful to her, and yet in a half-savage, half-poetic way, she comprehended the one object of his life, and honored it without doubt or question.

No day from that time passed by without her spending the evening hours under the roof of the haunted corn-tower.

She toiled all the other hours through, from the earliest time that the first flush of day lightened the starlit skies; did not he toil too? But when the sun set she claimed her freedom; and her taskmaster did not dare to say her nay.

A new and wondrous and exquisite life was shortly opening to her; the life of the imagination.

All these many years since the last song of Phratos had died off her ear, never again to be heard, she had spent with no more culture and with no more pleasure than the mule had that she led with his load along the miry ways in the sharp winter-time. Yet even through that utter neglect, and that torpor of thought and feeling, some wild natural fancy had been awake in her, some vague sense stir that brought to her in the rustle of leaves, in the sound of waters, the curling breath of mists, the white birth of lilies, in all the notes and hues of the open-air world, a mystery and a loveliness that they did not bear for any of those around her.

Now in the words that Arslàn cast to her—often as idly and indifferently as a man casts bread to frozen birds on snow, birds that he pities and yet cares nothing for—the old religions, the old beliefs, became to her living truths and divine companions. The perplexities of the world grew little clearer to her, indeed; and the miseries of the animal creation no less hideous a mystery. The confusion of all things was in nowise clearer to her; even, it might be, they deepened and grew more entangled. He could imbue her with neither credulity nor contentment; for he possessed neither, and despised both, as the fool's paradise of those who, having climbed a sand-hill, fancy that they have ascended Zion.

The weariness, the unrest, the desire, the contempt of such a mind as his can furnish anodynes neither to itself nor any other. But such possessions and consolations—and these are limitless—as the imagination can create, he placed within her reach. Before she had dreamed—dreamed all through the heaviness of toil and the gall of tyranny; but she had dreamed as a goatherd may upon a mist-swept hill, by the western seas, while all the earth is dark, and only its dim fugitive waking sounds steal dully on the drowsy ear. But now, through the myths and parables which grew familiar to her ear, she dreamed almost as poets dream, bathed in the full flood of a setting sun on the wild edge of the Campagna; a light in which all common things of daily life grow glorious, and through whose rosy hues the only sound that comes is some rich dulcet bell that slowly swings in all the majesty and melody of prayer.

The land was no more to her only a hard and cruel place of labor and butchery, in which all creatures suffered and were slain. All things rose to have their story and their symbol for her; Nature remaining to her that one sure solace and immeasurable mystery which she had feebly felt it even in her childhood, was brought closer to her, and made fuller of compassion. All the forms and voices of the fair dead years of the world seemed to grow visible and audible to her, with those marvelous tales of the old heroic age which little by little he unfolded to her.

In the people around her, and in their faiths, she had no belief; she wanted a faith, and found one in all these strange sweet stories of a perished time.

She had never thought that there had been any other generation before that which was present on earth with her; any other existence than this narrow and sordid one which encircled her. That men had lived who had fashioned those aerial wonders of the tall cathedral spires, and stained those vivid hues in its ancient casements, had been a fact too remote to be known to her, though for twelve years her eyes had gazed at them in reverence of their loveliness.

Through Arslàn the exhaustless annals of the world's history opened before her, the present ceased to matter to her in its penury and pain; for the treasury-houses of the golden past were opened to her sight. Most of all she loved the myths of the Homeric and Hesiodic ages; and every humble and homely thing became ennobled to her and enriched, beholding it through the halo of poetry and tradition.

When aloft in the red and white apple-blossoms two sparrows pecked and screamed and spent the pleasant summer hours above in the flower-scented air in shrill dispute and sharp contention, she thought that she heard in all their noisy notes the arrogant voices of Alcyone and Cyx. When the wild hyacinths made the ground purple beneath the poplars and the pines, she saw in them the transformed loveliness of one who had died in the fullness of youth, at play in a summer's noon, and died content because stricken by the hand of the greatest and goodliest of all gods, the god that loved him best. As the cattle, with their sleek red hides and curling horns, came through the fogs of the daybreak, across the level meadows, and through the deep dock-leaves, they seemed to her no more the mere beasts of stall and share, but even as the milk-white herds that grazed of yore in the blest pastures of Pieria.

All night, in the heart of the orchards, when the song of the nightingales rose on the stillness, it was no longer for her a little brown bird that sang to the budding fruit and the closed daisies, but was the voice of Ædon bewailing her son through the ages, or the woe of Philomela crying through the wilderness. When through the white hard brilliancy of noonday the swift swallow darted down the beams of light, she saw no longer in it an insect-hunter, a house-nesting creature, but saw the shape of Procne, slaughter-haunted, seeking rest and finding none. And when she went about her labors, hewing wood, drawing water, bearing the corn to the grindstones, leading the mules to the mill-stream, she ceased to despair. For she had heard the old glad story of the children of Zeus who dwelt so long within a herdsman's hut, nameless and dishonored, yet lived to go back crowned to Thebes and see the beasts of the desert and the stones of the streets rise up and obey the magic of their song.

Arslàn in his day had given many evil gifts, but this one gift that he gave was pure and full of solace: this gift of the beauty of the past. Imperfect, obscure, broken in fragments, obscured by her own ignorance, it was indeed when it reached her; yet it came with a glory that time could not dim, and a consolation that ignorance could not impair.

CHAPTER VI

"What has come to that evil one? She walks the land as though she were a queen," the people of Yprès said to one another, watching the creature they abhorred as she went through the town to the river-stair or to the market-stall.

She seemed to them transfigured.

A perpetual radiance shone in the dark depths of her eyes; a proud elasticity replaced the old sullen defiance of her carriage: her face had a sweet musing mystery and dreaminess on it; and when she smiled her smile was soft, and sudden, like the smile of one who bears fair tidings in her heart unspoken.

Even those people, dull and plodding and taciturn, absorbed in their small trades or in their continual field labor, were struck by the change in her, and looked after her, and listened in a stupid wonder to the sonorous songs in an unknown tongue that rose so often on her lips as she strode among the summer grasses or led the laden mules through the fords.

They saw, even with their eyes purblind from hate, that she had thrown off their yoke, and had escaped from their narrow world, and was happy with some rich, mute, nameless happiness that they could neither evade nor understand.

The fall of evening always brought her to him; he let her come, finding a certain charm in that savage temper which grew so tame to him, in that fierce courage which to him was so humble, in that absolute ignorance which was yet so curiously blended with so strong a power of fancy and so quick an instinct of beauty. But he let her go again with indifference, and never tried by any word to keep her an hour later than she chose to stay. She was to him like some handsome dangerous beast that flew at all others and crouched to him. He had a certain pleasure in her color and her grace; in making her great eyes glow, and seeing the light of awakening intelligence break over all her beautiful, clouded, fierce face.

As she learned, too, to hear more often the sound of her own voice, and to use a more varied and copious language, a rude eloquence came naturally to her; and when her silence was broken it was usually for some terse, vivid, picturesque utterance which had an artistic interest for him. In this simple and monotonous province, with its tedious sameness of life and its green arable country that tired the sight fed in youth on the grandeur of cloud-reaching mountains and the tumults of ice-tossing seas, this creature, so utterly unlike her kind, so golden with the glow of tawny desert suns, and so strong with the liberty and the ferocity and the dormant passion and the silent force of some free forest animal, was in a way welcome.

All things too were so new and strange to her; all common knowledge was so utterly unknown to her; all other kinds of life were so unintelligible to her; and yet with all her ignorance she had so swift a fancy, so keen an irony, so poetic an instinct, that it seemed to him when he spoke with her that he talked with some creature from another planet than his own.

He liked to make her smile; he liked to make her suffer; he liked to inflame, to wound, to charm, to tame her; he liked all these without passion, rather with curiosity than with interest, much as he had liked in the season of his boyhood to ruffle the plumage of a captured sea-bird; to see its eye sparkle, and then grow dull and flash again with pain, and then at the last turn soft with weary, wistful tenderness, having been taught at once the misery of bondage and the tyranny of a human love.

She was a bronzed, bare-footed, fleet-limbed young outcast, he told himself, with the scowl of an habitual defiance on her straight brows, and the curl of an untamable scorn upon her rich red lips, and a curious sovereignty and savageness in her dauntless carriage; and yet there was a certain nobility and melancholy in her that made her seem like one of a great and fallen race; and in her eyes there was a look repellant yet appealing, and lustrous with sleeping passion, that tempted him to wake what slumbered there.

But in these early springtide days he suffered her to come and go as she listed, without either persuasion or forbiddance on his own part.

The impassioned reverence which she had for the things he had created was only the untutored, unreasoning reverence of the barbarian or of the peasant; but it had a sweetness for him.

He had been alone so long; and so long had passed since any cheek had flushed and any breast had heaved under the influence of any one of those strange fancies and noble stories which he had pictured on the walls of his lonely chamber. He had despaired of and despised himself; despised his continual failure, had despaired of all power to sway the souls and gain the eyes of his fellow-men. It was a little thing—a thing so little that he called himself a fool for taking any count of it; yet, the hot tears that dimmed the sight of this young barbarian who was herself of no more value than the mill-dust that drifted on the breeze, the soft vague breathless awe that stole upon her as she gazed at the colorless shadows in which his genius had spent itself,—these were sweet to him with a sweetness that made him ashamed of his own weakness.

She had given the breath of life back to his body by an act of which he was ignorant; and now she gave back the breath of hope to his mind by a worship which he contemned even whilst he was glad of it.

Meanwhile the foul tongues of her enemies rang with loud glee over this new shame which they could cast at her.

"She has found a lover,—oh-ho!—that brown wicked thing! A lover meet for her;—a man who walks abroad in the moonless nights, and plucks the mandrake, and worships the devil, and paints people in their own likeness, so that as the color dries the life wastes!"—so the women screamed after her often as she went; she nothing understanding or heeding, but lost in the dreams of her own waking imagination.

At times such words as these reached Claudis Flamma, but he turned a deaf ear to them: he had the wisdom of the world in him, though he was only an old miller who had never stirred ten leagues from his home; and whilst the devil served him well, he quarreled not with the devil.

In a grim way, it was a pleasure to him to think that the thing he hated might be accursed body and soul: he had never cared either for her body or her soul; so that the first worked for him, the last might destroy itself in its own darkness:—he had never stretched a finger to hold it back.

The pride and the honesty and the rude candor and instinctive purity of this young life of hers had been a perpetual hinderance and canker to him: begotten of evil, by all the laws of justice, in evil she should live and die. So Flamma reasoned; and to the sayings of his countryside he gave a stony ear and a stony glance. She never once, after the first day, breathed a word to Arslàn of the treatment that she received at Yprès. It was not in her nature to complain; and she abhorred even his pity. Whatever she endured, she kept silence on it; when he asked her how her grandsire dealt with her, she always answered him, "It is well enough with me now." He cared not enough for her to doubt her.

And, in a manner, she had learned how to keep her tyrant at bay. He did not dare to lay hands on her now that her eyes had got that new fire, and her voice that stern serene contempt. His wolf cub had shown her teeth at last, at the lash, and he did not venture to sting her to revolt with too long use of scourge and chain.

So she obtained more leisure; and what she did not spend in Arslàn's tower she spent in acquiring another art,—she learned to read.

There was an old herb-seller in the market-place who was not so harsh to her as the others were, but who had now and then for her a rough kindly word out of gentleness to the memory of Reine Flamma. This woman was better educated than most, and could even write a little.

To her Folle-Farine went.

"See here," she said, "you are feeble, and I am strong. I know every nook and corner in the woods. I know a hundred rare herbs that you never find. I will bring you a basketful of them twice in each week if you will show me how to read those signs that the people call letters."

The old woman hesitated. "It were as much as my life is worth to have you seen with me. The lads will stone my window. Still–" The wish for the rare herbs, and the remembrance of the fatigue that would be spared to her rheumatic body by compliance, prevailed over her fears. She consented.

Three times a week Folle-Farine rose while it was still dark, and scoured the wooded lands and the moss-green orchards and the little brooks in the meadows in search of every herb that grew. She knew those green places which had been her only kingdom and her only solace as no one else knew them; and the old dame's herb-stall was the envy and despair of all the market-place.

Now and then a laborer earlier than the rest, or a vagrant sleeping under a hedge-row, saw her going through the darkness with her green bundle on her head, or stooping among the watercourses ankle-deep in rushes, and he crossed himself and went and told how he had seen the Evil Spirit of Yprès gathering the poison-weeds that made ships founder, and strong men droop and die, and women love unnatural and horrible things, and all manner of woe and sickness overtake those she hated.

Often, too, at this lonely time, before the day broke, she met Arslàn.

It was his habit to be abroad when others slept: studies of the night and its peculiar loveliness entered largely into many of his paintings; the beauty of water rippling in the moonbeam, of gray reeds blowing against the first faint red of dawn, of dark fields with sleeping cattle and folded sheep, of dreamy pools made visible by the shine of their folded white lilies,—these were all things he cared to study.

The earth has always most charm, and least pain, to the poet or the artist when men are hidden away under their roofs. They do not then break its calm with either their mirth or their brutality, the vile and revolting coarseness of their works, only built to blot it with so much deformity, is softened and obscured in the purple breadths of shadow and the dim tender gleam of stars; and it was thus that Arslàn loved best to move abroad.

Sometimes the shepherd going to his flocks, or the housewife opening her shutter in the wayside cabin, or the huckster driving early his mule seawards to meet the fish that the night-trawlers had brought, saw them together thus, and talked of it; and said that these two, accursed of all honest folk, were after some unholy work—coming from the orgy of some witches' sabbath, or seeking some devil's root that would give them the treasured gold of misers' tombs or the power of life and death.

For these things are still believed by many a peasant's hearth, and whispered darkly as night closes in and the wind rises.

Wading in the shallow streams, with the breeze tossing her hair, and the dew bright on her sheaf of herbs, Folle-Farine paid thus the only wages she could for learning the art of letters.

The acquisition was hard and hateful—a dull plodding task that she detested; and her teacher was old, and ignorant of all the grace and the lore of books. She could only learn too at odd snatches of time, with the cabin-window barred up and the light shut out, for the old peasant was fearful of gaining a bad name among her neighbors if she were seen in communion with the wicked thing of Yprès.

Still she, the child, persevered, and before long possessed herself of the rudiments of letters, though she had only one primer to learn from that belonged to the herb-seller—a rude old tattered pamphlet recounting the life and death of Catherine of Siena. It was not that she had cared to read, for reading's sake: books, she heard, only told the thoughts and the creeds of the human race, and she cared nothing to know these; but one day he had said to her, half unconsciously, "If only you were not so ignorant!"—and since that day she had set herself to clear away her ignorance little by little, as she would have cleared brushwood with her hatchet.

It was the sweetest hour she had ever known when she was able to stand before him and say, "The characters that men print are no longer riddles to me."

He praised her; and she was glad and proud.

It was love that had entered into her, but a great and noble love, full of intense humility, of supreme self-sacrifice;—a love that unconsciously led her to chasten into gentleness the fierce soul in her, and to try and seek light for the darkness of her mind.

He saw the influence he had on her, but he was careless of it.

A gipsy-child working for bread at a little mill-house in these Norman woods,—what use would be to her beauty of thought, grace of fancy, the desire begotten of knowledge, the poetry learned from the past? Still he gave her these; partly because he pitied her, partly because in his exhaustion and solitude this creature, in her beauty and her submission, was welcome to him.

And yet he thought so little of her, and chiefly, when he thought of her, chose to perplex her or to wound her, that he might see her eyes dilate in wondering amaze, or her face quiver and flush, and then grow dark, with the torment of a mute and subdued pain.

She was a study to him, as was the scarlet rose in the garden-ways, or the purple-breasted pigeon in the woods; he dealt with her as he would have dealt with the flower or the bird if he had wished to study them more nearly, by tearing the rose open at its core, or casting a stone at the blue-rock on the wing.

This was not cruelty in him; it was only habit—habit, and the callousness begotten by his own continual pain.

The pain as of a knife forever thrust into the loins, of a cord forever knotted hard about the temples, which is the daily and nightly penalty of those mad enough to believe that they have the force in them to change the sluggard appetites and the hungry cruelties of their kind into a life of high endeavor and divine desire.

He held that a man's chief passion is his destiny, and will shape his fate, rough-hew his fate as circumstance or as hazard may.

His chief, his sole, passion was a great ambition—a passion pure as crystal, since the eminence he craved was for his creations, not for his name. Yet it had failed to compel the destiny that he had believed to be his own: and yet every hour he seemed to sink lower and lower into oblivion, further and further from the possibility of any fulfillment of his dreams; and the wasted years of his life fell away one by one into the gulf of the past, vain, unheard, unfruitful, as the frozen words on the deck of the ship of Pantagruel.

"What is the use?" he muttered, half aloud, one day before his paintings. "What is the use? If I die to-morrow they will sell for so much rubbish to heat a bakery store. It is only a mad waste of hours—waste of color, of canvas, of labor. The world has told me so many years. The world always knows what it wants. It selects unerringly. It must know better than I do. The man is a fool, indeed, who presumes to be wiser than all his generation. If the world will have nothing to do with you, go and hang yourself—or if you fear to do that, dig a ditch as a grave for a daily meal. Give over dreams. The world knows what it wants, and if it wanted you would take you. It has brazen lungs to shout for what it needs; the lungs of a multitude. It is no use what your own voice whispers you unless those great lungs also shout before you, Hosannah."

So he spoke to himself in bitterness of soul, standing before his cartoons into which he had thrown all the genius there was in him, and which hung there unseen save by the spider that wove and the moth that flew over them.

Folle-Farine, who was that day in his chamber, looked at him with the wistful, far-reaching comprehension which an unerring instinct taught her.

"Of a winter night," she said, slowly, "I have heard old Pitchou read aloud to Flamma, and she read of their God, the one they hang everywhere on the crosses here; and the story was that the populace scourged and nailed to death the one whom they knew afterwards, when too late, to have been the great man they looked for, and that then being bidden to make their choice of one to save, they choose to ransom and honor a thief: one called Barabbas. Is it true?—if the world's choice were wrong once, why not twice?"