Kitabı oku: «Folle-Farine», sayfa 22
And triumphant in the throng, whose choice he was, seated aloft upon men's shoulders, with a purple robe thrown on his shoulders, there sat a brawny, grinning, bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage eyes, and satyr's leer: the creature of greed of lust, of obscenity, of brutality, of avarice, of desire. This man the people followed, rejoicing exceedingly, content in the guide whom they had chosen, victorious in the fiend for whom they spurned a deity; crying, with wide-open throats and brazen lungs,—"Barabbas!"
There was not a form in all this closed-packed throng which had not a terrible irony in it, which was not in itself a symbol of some lust or of some vice, for which women and men abjure the godhead in them.
One gorged drunkard lay asleep with his amphora broken beneath him, the stream of the purple wine lapped eagerly by ragged children.
A money-changer had left the receipt of custom, eager to watch and shout, and a thief clutched both hands full of the forsaken coins and fled.
A miser had dropped a bag of gold, and stopped to catch at all the rolling pieces, regardless in his greed how the crowd trampled and trod on him.
A mother chid and struck her little brown curly child, because he stretched his arms and turned his face towards the thorn-crowned captive.
A priest of the temple, with a blood-stained knife thrust in his girdle, dragged beside him, by the throat, a little tender lamb doomed for the sacrifice.
A dancing-woman with jewels in her ears, and half naked to the waist, sounding the brazen cymbals above her head, drew a score of youths after her in Barabbas' train.
On one of the flat roof-tops, reclining on purple and fine linen, looking down on the street below from the thick foliage of her citron boughs and her red Syrian roses, was an Egyptian wanton; and leaning beside her, tossing golden apples into her bosom, was a young centurion of the Roman guard, languid and laughing, with his fair chest bare to the heat, and his armor flung in a pile beside him.
And thus, in like manner, every figure bore its parable; whilst above all was the hard, hot, cruel, cloudless sky of blue, without one faintest mist to break its horrible serenity, and, high in the azure ether and against the sun, an eagle and a vulture fought, locked close, and tearing at each other's breasts.
Six nights the conception occupied him—his days were not his own, he spent them in a rough mechanical labor which his strength executed while his mind was far away from it; but the nights were all his, and at the end of the sixth night the thing arose, perfect as far as his hand could perfect it; begotten by a chance and ignorant word as have been many of the greatest works the world has seen;—oaks sprung from the acorn that a careless child has let fall.
When he had finished it, his arm dropped to his side, he stood motionless; the red glow of the dawn lighting the dreamy depths of his sleepless eyes.
He knew that his work was good.
The artist, for one moment of ecstasy, realizes the content of a god when, resting from his labors, he knows that those labors have borne their full fruit.
It is only for a moment; the greater the artist the more swiftly will discontent and misgiving overtake him, the more quickly will the feebleness of his execution disgust him in comparison with the splendor of his ideal; the more surely will he—though the world ring with applause of him—be enraged and derisive and impatient at himself.
But while the moment lasts it is a rapture; keen, pure, intense, surpassing every other. In it, fleeting though it be, he is blessed with a blessing that never falls on any other creature. The work of his brain and of his hand contents him,—it is the purest joy on earth.
Arslàn knew that joy as he looked on the vast imagination for which he had given up sleep, and absorbed in which he had almost forgotten hunger and thirst and the passage of time.
He had known no rest until he had embodied the shapes that pursued him. He had scarcely spoken, barely slumbered an hour; tired out, consumed with restless fever, weak from want of sleep and neglect of food he had worked on, and on, and on, until the vision as he had beheld it lived there, recorded for the world that denied him.
As he looked on it he felt his own strength, and was glad; he had faith in himself though he had faith in no other thing; he ceased to care what other fate befell him, so that only this supreme power of creation remained with him.
His lamp died out; the bell of a distant clock chimed the fourth hour of the passing night.
The day broke in the east, beyond the gray levels of the fields and plains; the dusky crimson of the dawn rose over the cool dark skies; the light of the morning stars came in and touched the visage of his fettered Christ; all the rest was in shadow.
He himself remained motionless before it. He knew that in it lay the best achievement, the highest utterance, the truest parable, that the genius in him had ever conceived and put forth;—and he knew too that he was as powerless to raise it to the public sight of men as though he were stretched dead beneath it. He knew that there would be none to heed whether it rotted there in the dust, or perished by moth or by flame, unless indeed some illness should befall him, and it should be taken with the rest to satisfy some petty debt of bread, or oil, or fuel.
There, on that wall, he had written, with all the might there was in him, his warning to the age in which he lived, his message to future generations, his claims to men's remembrance after death: and there were none to see, none to read, none to believe. Great things, beautiful things, things of wisdom, things of grace, things terrible in their scorn and divine in their majesty, rose up about him, incarnated by his mind and his hand—and their doom was to fade and wither without leaving one human mind the richer for their story, one human soul the nobler for their meaning.
To the humanity around him they had no value save such value of a few coins as might lie in them to liquidate some miserable scare at the bakehouse or the oilshop in the streets of the town.
A year of labor, and the cartoon could be transferred to the permanent life of the canvas; and he was a master of color, and loved to wrestle with its intricacies as the mariner struggles with the storm.
"But what were the use?" he pondered as he stood there. "What the use to be at pains to give it its full life on canvas? No man will ever look on it."
All labors of his art were dear to him, and none wearisome: yet he doubted what it would avail to commence the perpetuation of this work on canvas.
If the world were never to know that it existed, it would be as well to leave it there on its gray sea of paper, to be moved to and fro with each wind that blew through the broken rafters, and to be brushed by the wing of the owl and the flittermouse.
The door softly unclosed; he did not hear it.
Across the chamber Folle-Farine stole noiselessly.
She had come and gone thus a score of times through those six nights of his vigil; and he had seldom seen her, never spoken to her; now and then she had touched him, and placed before him some simple meal of herbs and bread, and he had taken it half unconsciously, and drunk great draughts of water, and turned back again to his work, not noticing that she had brought to him what he sorely needed, and yet would not of himself have remembered.
She came to him without haste and without sound, and stood before him and looked;—looked with all her soul in her awed eyes.
The dawn was brighter now, red and hazy with curious faint gleams of radiance from the sun, that as yet was not risen. All the light there was fell on the crowd of Jerusalem.
One ray white and pure fell upon the bowed head of the bound God.
She stood and gazed at it.
She had watched it all grow gradually into being from out the chaos of dull spaces and confused lines. This art, which could call life from the dry wastes of wood and paper, and shed perpetual light where all was darkness, was even to her an alchemy incomprehensible, immeasurable; a thing not to be criticised or questioned, but adored in all its unscrutable and majestic majesty. To her it could not have been more marvelous if his hand had changed the river-sand to gold, or his touch wakened the dead cornflowers to bloom afresh as living asphodels. But now for once she forgot the sorcery of the art in the terror and the pathos of the story that it told; now for once she forgot, in the creation, its creator.
All she saw was the face of the Christ,—the pale bent face, in whose eyes there was a patience so perfect, a pity so infinite, a reproach that had no wrath, a scorn that had no cruelty.
She had hated the Christ on the cross, because he was the God of the people she hated, and in whose name they reviled her. But this Christ moved her strangely—there, in the light, alone; betrayed and forsaken while the crowd rushed on, lauding Barabbas.
Ignorant though she was, the profound meanings of the parable penetrated her with their ironies and with their woe—the parable of the genius rejected and the thief exalted.
She trembled and was silent; and in her eyes sudden tears swam.
"They have talked of their God—often—so often," she muttered. "But I never knew till now what they meant."
Arslàn turned and looked at her. He had not known that she was there.
"Is it so?" he said, slowly. "Well—the world refuses me fame; but I do not know that the world could give me a higher tribute than your admiration."
"The world?" she echoed, with her eyes still fastened on the head of the Christ and the multitudes that flocked after Barabbas. "The world? You care for the world—you?—who have painted that?"
Arslàn did not answer her: he felt the rebuke.
He had drawn the picture in all its deadly irony, in all its pitiless truth, only himself to desire and strive for the wine streams and the painted harlotry, and the showers of gold, and the false gods of a worldly success.
Was he a renegade to his own religion; a skeptic of his own teaching?
It was not for the first time that the dreamy utterances of this untrained and imperfect intelligence had struck home to the imperious and mature intellect of the man of genius.
He flung his charcoal away, and looked at the sun as it rose.
"Even I!" he answered her. "We, who call ourselves poets or painters, can see the truth and can tell it,—we are prophets so far,—but when we come down from our Horeb we hanker for the flesh-pots and the dancing-women, and the bags of gold, like all the rest. We are no better than those we preach to; perhaps we are worse. Our eyes are set to the light; but our feet are fixed in the mire."
She did not hear him; and had she heard, would not have comprehended.
Her eyes were still fastened on the Christ, and the blood in her cheeks faded and glowed at every breath she drew, and in her eye there was the wistful, wondering, trustful reverence which shone in those of the child, who, breaking from his mother's arms, and, regardless of the soldier's stripes, clung to the feet of the scourged captive, and there kneeled and prayed.
Without looking at her, Arslàn went out to his daily labor on the waters.
The sun had fully risen; the day was red and clear; the earth was hushed in perfect stillness; the only sounds there were came from the wings and voices of innumerable birds.
"And yet I desire nothing for myself," he thought. "I would lie down and die to-morrow, gladly, did I know that they would live."
Yet he knew that to desire a fame after death, was as idle as to desire with a child's desire, the stars.
For the earth is crowded full with clay gods and false prophets, and fresh legions forever arriving to carry on the old strife for supremacy; and if a man pass unknown all the time that his voice is audible, and his hand visible, through the sound and smoke of the battle, he will dream in vain of any remembrance when the gates of the grave shall have closed on him and shut him forever from sight.
When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to garner its recollections; even to pause and look back, and to see what flower of a fair thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or left down-trodden.
But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind and heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest, and can find none; nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and suffocated under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow to be moved, and swift—terribly swift—to forget.
Why should it not be?
It has known the best, it has known the worst, that ever can befall it.
And the prayer which to the heart of a man seems so freshly born from his own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same old old cry that it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound of the wind, and forever—forever unanswered!
CHAPTER VII
One day, while the year was still young, though the first thunder-heats of the early summer had come, he asked her to go with him to the sea ere the sun set.
"The sea?" she repeated. "What is that?"
"Is it possible that you do not know?" he asked, in utter wonder. "You who have lived all these years within two leagues of it!"
"I have heard often of it," she said, simply; "but I cannot tell what it is."
"The man has never yet lived who could tell—in fit language. Poseidon is the only one of all the old gods of Hellas who still lives and reigns. We will go to his kingdom. Sight is better than speech."
So he took her along the slow course of the inland water through the osiers and the willows, down to where the slow river ripples would meet the swift salt waves.
It was true what she had said, that she had never seen the sea. Her errands had always been to and fro between the mill and the quay in the town, no farther; she had exchanged so little communion with the people of the district that she knew nothing of whither the barges went that took away the corn and fruit, nor whence the big boats came that brought the coals and fish; when she had a little space of leisure to herself she had wandered indeed, but never so far as the shore; almost always in the woods and the meadows; never where the river, widening as it ran, spread out between level banks until, touching the sea, it became a broad estuary.
She had heard speak of the sea, indeed, as of some great highway on which men traveled incessantly to and fro; as of something unintelligible, remote, belonging to others, indifferent and alien to herself.
When she had thought of it at all, she had only thought of it as probably some wide canal black with mud and dust and edged by dull pathways slippery and toilsome, along which tired horses towed heavy burdens all day long, that men and women might be thereby enriched of the beauty and the mystery. Of the infinite sweetness and solace of the sea, she knew no more than she knew of any loveliness or of any pity in human nature.
A few leagues off, where the stream widened into a bay and was hemmed in by sand-banks in lieu of its flat green pastures, there was a little fishing-town, built under the great curve of beetling cliffs, and busy with all the stir and noise of mart and wharf. There the sea was crowded with many masts and ruddy with red-brown canvas; and the air was full of the salt scent of rotting sea-weed, of stiff sails spread out to dry, of great shoals of fish poured out upon the beach, and of dusky noisome cabins, foul smelling and made hideous by fishwives' oaths, and the death-screams of scalded shellfish.
He did not take her thither.
He took her half way down the stream whilst it was still sleepily beautiful with pale gray willows and green meadow-land, and acres of silvery reeds, and here and there some quaint old steeple or some apple-hidden roofs on either side its banks. But midway he left the water and stretched out across the country, she beside him, moving with that rapid, lithe, and staglike ease of limbs that have never known restraint.
Some few people passed them on their way: a child, taking the cliff-road to his home under the rocks, with a big blue pitcher in his bands; an old man, who had a fishing-brig at sea and toiled up there to look for her, with a gray dog at his heels, and the smell of salt water in his clothes; a goatherd, clad in rough skins, wool outward, and killing birds with stones as he went; a woman, with a blue skirt and scarlet hose, and a bundle of boughs and brambles on her head, with here and there a stray winter berry glowing red through the tender green leafage; all these looked askance at them, and the goatherd muttered a curse, and the woman a prayer, and gave them wide way through the stunted furze, for they were both of them accursed in the people's sight.
"You find it hard to live apart from your kind?" he asked her suddenly as they gained the fields where no human habitation at all was left, and over which in the radiance of the still sunlit skies there hung the pale crescent of a week-old moon.
"To live apart?"—she did not understand.
"Yes—like this. To have no child smile, no woman gossip, no man exchange good-morrow with you. Is it any sorrow to you?"
Her eyes flashed through the darkness fiercely.
"What does it matter? It is best so. One is free. One owes nothing—not so much as a fair word. That is well."
"I think it is well—if one is strong enough for it. It wants strength."
"I am strong."
She spoke quietly, with the firm and simple consciousness of force, which has as little of vanity in it as it has of weakness.
"To live apart," she said, after a pause, in which he had not answered. "I know what you mean—now. It is well—it was well with those men you tell me of, when the world was young, who left all other men and went to live with the watercourse and the wild dove, and the rose and the palm, and the great yellow desert; was it not well?"
"So well with them that men worshiped them for it. But there is no such worship now. The cities are the kingdom of heaven, not the deserts; and he who hankers for the wilderness is stoned in the streets as a fool. And how should it be well with you, who have neither wild rose nor wild dove for compensation, but are only beaten and hooted, and hated and despised?"
Her eyes glittered through the darkness, and her voice was hard and fierce as she answered him:
"See here.—There is a pretty golden thing in the west road of the town who fears me horribly, Yvonne, the pottery painter's daughter. She says to her father at evening, 'I must go read the offices to old Mother Margot;' and he says, 'Go, my daughter; piety and reverence of age are twin blossoms on one stem of a tree that grows at the right hand of God in Paradise.'
"And she goes; not to Margot, but to a little booth, where there is dancing, and singing, and brawling, that her father has forbade her to go near by a league.
"There is an old man at the corner of the market-place, Ryno, the fruitseller, who says that I am accursed, and spits out at me as I pass. He says to the people as they go by his stall, 'See these peaches, they are smooth and rosy as a child's cheek; sweet and firm; not their like betwixt this and Paris. I will let you have them cheap, so cheap; I need sorely to send money to my sick son in Africa.' And the people pay, greedily; and when the peaches are home they see a little black speck in each of them, and all save their bloom is rottenness.
"There is a woman who makes lace at the window of the house against the fourth gate; Marion Silvis; she is white and sleek, and blue-eyed; the priests honor her, and she never misses a mass. She has an old blind mother whom she leaves in her room. She goes out softly at nightfall, and she slips to a wineshop full of soldiers, and her lovers kiss her on the mouth. And the old mother sits moaning and hungry at home; and a night ago she was badly burned, being alone. Now—is it well or no to be hated of those people? If I had loved them, and they me, I might have become a liar, and have thieved, and have let men kiss me, likewise."
She spoke with thoughtful and fierce earnestness, not witting of the caustic in her own words, meaning simply what she said, and classing the kisses of men as some sort of weakness and vileness, like those of a theft and a lie; as she had come to do out of a curious, proud, true instinct that was in her, and not surely from the teaching of any creature.
She in her way loved the man who walked beside her; but it was a love of which she was wholly unconscious; a pity, a sorrow, a reverence, a passion, a deification, all combined, that had little or nothing in common with the loves of human kind, and which still left her speech as free, and her glance as fearless, with him as with any other.
He knew that; and he did not care to change it; it was singular, and gave her half her charm of savageness and innocence commingled. He answered her merely, with a smile:
"You are only a barbarian; how should you understand that the seductions of civilization lie in its multiplications of the forms of vice? Men would not bear its yoke an hour if it did not in return facilitate their sins. You are an outcast from it;—so you have kept your hands honest and your lips pure. You may be right to be thankful—I would not pretend to decide."
"At least—I would not be as they are," she answered him with a curl of the mouth, and a gleam in her eyes: the pride of the old nomadic tribes, whose blood was in her, asserting itself against the claimed superiority of the tamed and hearth-bound races—blood that ran free and fearless to the measure of boundless winds and rushing waters; that made the forest and the plain, the dawn and the darkness, the flight of the wild roe and the hiding-place of the wood pigeon, dearer than any roof-tree, sweeter than any nuptial bed.
She had left the old life so long—so long that even her memories of it were dim as dreams, and its language had died off her lips in all save the broken catches of her songs; but the impulses of it were in her, vivid and ineradicable, and the scorn with which the cowed and timid races of hearth and of homestead regarded her, she, the daughter of Taric, gave back to them in tenfold measure.
"I would not be as they are!" she repeated, her eyes glancing through the sunshine of the cloudless day. "To sit and spin; to watch their soup-pot boil; to spend their days under a close roof; to shut the stars out, and cover themselves in their beds, as swine do with their straw in the sty; to huddle all together in thousands, fearing to do what they will, lest the tongue of their neighbor wag evil of it; to cheat a little and steal a little, and lie always when the false word serves them, and to mutter to themselves, 'God will wash us free of our sins,' and then to go and sin again stealthily, thinking men will not see and sure that their God will give them a quittance;—that is their life. I would not be as they are."
And her spirits rose, and her earliest life in the Liebana seemed to flash on her for one moment clear and bright through the veil of the weary years, and she walked erect and swiftly through the gorse, singing by his side the bold burden of one of the old sweet songs.
And for the first time the thought passed over Arslàn:
"This tameless wild doe would crouch like a spaniel, and be yoked as a beast of burden,—if I chose."
Whether or no he chose he was not sure.
She was beautiful in her way; barbaric, dauntless, innocent, savage; he cared to hurt, to please, to arouse, to study, to portray her; but to seek love from her he did not care.
And yet she was most lovely in her own wild fashion like a young desert mare, or a seagull on the wing; and he wondered to himself that he cared for her no more, as he moved beside her through the thickets of the gorse and against the strong wind blowing from the sea.
There was so little passion left in him.
He had tossed aside the hair of dead women and portrayed the limbs and the features of living ones till that ruthless pursuit had brought its own penalty with it; and the beauty of women scarcely moved him more than did the plumage of a bird or the contour of a marble. His senses were drugged, and his heart was dead; it was well that it should be so, he had taught himself to desire it; and yet–
As they left the cliff-road for the pathless downs that led toward the summit of the rocks, they passed by a wayside hut, red with climbing creepers, and all alone on the sandy soil, like the little nest of a yellowhammer.
Through its unclosed shutter the light of the sun streamed into it; the interior was visible. It was very poor—a floor of mud, a couch of rushes; a hearth on which a few dry sticks were burning; walls lichen-covered and dropping moisture. Before the sticks, kneeling and trying to make them burn up more brightly to warm the one black pot that hung above them, was a poor peasant girl, and above her leaned a man who was her lover, a fisher of the coast, as poor, as hardy, and as simple as herself.
In the man's eye the impatience of love was shining, and as she lifted her head, after breathing with all her strength on the smoking sticks, he bent and drew her in his arms and kissed her rosy mouth and the white lids that drooped over her bright blue smiling northern eyes. She let the fuel lie still to blaze or smoulder as it would, and leaned her head against him, and laughed softly at his eagerness. Arslàn glanced at them as he passed.
"Poor brutes!" he muttered. "Yet how happy they are! It must be well to be so easily content, and to find a ready-made fool's paradise in a woman's lips."
Folle-Farine hearing him, paused, and looked also. She trembled suddenly, and walked on in silence.
A new light broke on her, and dazzled her, and made her afraid: this forest-born creature, who had never known what fear was.
The ground ascended as it stretched seaward, but on it there were only wide dull fields of colza or of grass lying, sickly and burning, under the fire of the late afternoon sun. The slope was too gradual to break their monotony.
Above them was the cloudless weary blue; below them was the faint parched green; other color there was none; one little dusky panting bird flew by pursued by a kite; that was the only change.
She asked him no questions; she walked mutely and patiently by his side; she hated the dull heat, the colorless waste, the hard scorch of the air, the dreary changelessness of the scene. But she did not say so. He had chosen to come to them.
A league onward the fields were merged into a heath, uncultivated and covered with short prickly furze; on the brown earth between the stunted bushes a few goats were cropping the burnt-up grasses. Here the slope grew sharper, and the earth seemed to rise up between the sky and them, steep and barren as a house-roof.
Once he asked her,—
"Are you tired?"
She shook her head.
Her feet ached, and her heart throbbed; her limbs were heavy like lead in the heat and the toil. But she did not tell him so. She would have dropped dead from exhaustion rather than have confessed to him any weakness.
He took the denial as it was given, and pressed onward up the ascent.
The sun was slanting towards the west; the skies seemed like brass; the air was sharp, yet scorching; the dull brown earth still rose up before them like a wall; they climbed it slowly and painfully, their hands and their teeth filled with its dust, that drifted in a cloud before them. He bade her close her eyes, and she obeyed him. He stretched his arm out and drew her after him up the ascent that was slippery from drought and prickly from the stunted growth of furze.
On the summit he stood still and released her.
"Now look."
She opened her eyes with the startled half-questioning stare of one led out from utter darkness into a full and sudden light.
Then, with a cry, she sank down on the rock, trembling, weeping, laughing, stretching out her arms to the new glory that met her sight, dumb with its grandeur, delirious with its delight.
For what she saw was the sea.
Before her dazzled sight all its beauty stretched, the blueness of the waters meeting the blueness of the skies; radiant with all the marvels of its countless hues; softly stirred by a low wind that sighed across it; bathed in a glow of gold that streamed on it from the westward; rolling from north to south in slow sonorous measure, filling the silent air with ceaseless melody. The luster of the sunset beamed upon it; the cool fresh smell of its water shot like new life through all the scorch and stupor of the day; its white foam curled and broke on the brown curving rocks and wooded inlets of the shores; innumerable birds, that gleamed like silver, floated or flew above its surface; all was still, still as death, save only for the endless movement of those white swift wings and the susurrus of the waves, in which all meaner and harsher sounds of earth seemed lost and hushed to slumber and to silence.
The sea alone reigned, as it reigned in the sweet young years of the earth when men were not; as, maybe, it will be its turn to reign again in the years to come, when men and all their works shall have passed away and be no more seen nor any more remembered.
Arslàn watched her in silence.
He was glad that it should awe and move her thus. The sea was the only thing for which he cared; or which had any power over him. In the northern winter of his youth he had known the ocean in one wild night's work undo all that men had done to check and rule it, and burst through all the barriers that they had raised against it, and throw down the stones of the altar and quench the fires of the hearth, and sweep through the fold and the byre, and flood the cradle of the child and the grave of the grandsire. He had seen the storms wash away at one blow the corn harvests of years, and gather in the sheep from the hills, and take the life of the shepherd with the life of the flock. He had seen it claim lovers locked in each other's arms, and toss the fair curls of the first-born as it tossed the ribbon-weeds of its deeps. And he had felt small pity; it had rather given him a sense of rejoicing and triumph to see the water laugh to scorn those who were so wise in their own conceit, and bind beneath its chains those who held themselves masters over all beasts of the field and birds of the air.
