← catalogue

Lilith: A Romance

by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #1640 · 520,578 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lilith: A Romance
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Lilith: A Romance

Author: George MacDonald


        
Release date: February 1, 1999 [eBook #1640]
                Most recently updated: March 29, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1640

Credits: Produced by John Bechard, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LILITH: A ROMANCE ***




LILITH

By George MacDonald




I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting
sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden
rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I
was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining
family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord,
unknown to me,--to whom the sun was servant,--who had not gone into
society in the village,--who had not been called on. I saw their
park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s
cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew.
Their house was not obvious to vision; their trees grew through it. I
do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not.
They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters.
They are quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly
through their hall, does not in the least put them out,--as the muddy
bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies.
They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their
neighbor,--notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team
through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their
coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks.
Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics.
There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving
or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done
away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,--as of a distant hive in
May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle
thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry
was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out
of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and
recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to
recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their
cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should
move out of Concord.

Thoreau: “WALKING.”




CHAPTER I. THE LIBRARY

I had just finished my studies at Oxford, and was taking a brief holiday
from work before assuming definitely the management of the estate. My
father died when I was yet a child; my mother followed him within a
year; and I was nearly as much alone in the world as a man might find
himself.

I had made little acquaintance with the history of my ancestors. Almost
the only thing I knew concerning them was, that a notable number of them
had been given to study. I had myself so far inherited the tendency as
to devote a good deal of my time, though, I confess, after a somewhat
desultory fashion, to the physical sciences. It was chiefly the wonder
they woke that drew me. I was constantly seeing, and on the outlook to
see, strange analogies, not only between the facts of different sciences
of the same order, or between physical and metaphysical facts, but
between physical hypotheses and suggestions glimmering out of the
metaphysical dreams into which I was in the habit of falling. I was at
the same time much given to a premature indulgence of the impulse to
turn hypothesis into theory. Of my mental peculiarities there is no
occasion to say more.

The house as well as the family was of some antiquity, but no
description of it is necessary to the understanding of my narrative.
It contained a fine library, whose growth began before the invention
of printing, and had continued to my own time, greatly influenced, of
course, by changes of taste and pursuit. Nothing surely can more impress
upon a man the transitory nature of possession than his succeeding to
an ancient property! Like a moving panorama mine has passed from before
many eyes, and is now slowly flitting from before my own.

The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house
and additions to it, had nevertheless, like an encroaching state,
absorbed one room after another until it occupied the greater part of
the ground floor. Its chief room was large, and the walls of it were
covered with books almost to the ceiling; the rooms into which it
overflowed were of various sizes and shapes, and communicated in modes
as various--by doors, by open arches, by short passages, by steps up and
steps down.

In the great room I mainly spent my time, reading books of science,
old as well as new; for the history of the human mind in relation to
supposed knowledge was what most of all interested me. Ptolemy, Dante,
the two Bacons, and Boyle were even more to me than Darwin or Maxwell,
as so much nearer the vanished van breaking into the dark of ignorance.

In the evening of a gloomy day of August I was sitting in my usual
place, my back to one of the windows, reading. It had rained the greater
part of the morning and afternoon, but just as the sun was setting, the
clouds parted in front of him, and he shone into the room. I rose and
looked out of the window. In the centre of the great lawn the feathering
top of the fountain column was filled with his red glory. I turned to
resume my seat, when my eye was caught by the same glory on the one
picture in the room--a portrait, in a sort of niche or little shrine
sunk for it in the expanse of book-filled shelves. I knew it as the
likeness of one of my ancestors, but had never even wondered why it hung
there alone, and not in the gallery, or one of the great rooms, among
the other family portraits. The direct sunlight brought out the painting
wonderfully; for the first time I seemed to see it, and for the first
time it seemed to respond to my look. With my eyes full of the light
reflected from it, something, I cannot tell what, made me turn and cast
a glance to the farther end of the room, when I saw, or seemed to see,
a tall figure reaching up a hand to a bookshelf. The next instant, my
vision apparently rectified by the comparative dusk, I saw no one,
and concluded that my optic nerves had been momentarily affected from
within.

I resumed my reading, and would doubtless have forgotten the vague,
evanescent impression, had it not been that, having occasion a moment
after to consult a certain volume, I found but a gap in the row where it
ought to have stood, and the same instant remembered that just there I
had seen, or fancied I saw, the old man in search of a book. I looked
all about the spot but in vain. The next morning, however, there it
was, just where I had thought to find it! I knew of no one in the house
likely to be interested in such a book.

Three days after, another and yet odder thing took place.

In one of the walls was the low, narrow door of a closet, containing
some of the oldest and rarest of the books. It was a very thick door,
with a projecting frame, and it had been the fancy of some ancestor to
cross it with shallow shelves, filled with book-backs only. The harmless
trick may be excused by the fact that the titles on the sham backs
were either humorously original, or those of books lost beyond hope of
recovery. I had a great liking for the masked door.

To complete the illusion of it, some inventive workman apparently had
shoved in, on the top of one of the rows, a part of a volume thin enough
to lie between it and the bottom of the next shelf: he had cut away
diagonally a considerable portion, and fixed the remnant with one of
its open corners projecting beyond the book-backs. The binding of the
mutilated volume was limp vellum, and one could open the corner far
enough to see that it was manuscript upon parchment.

Happening, as I sat reading, to raise my eyes from the page, my glance
fell upon this door, and at once I saw that the book described, if
book it may be called, was gone. Angrier than any worth I knew in it
justified, I rang the bell, and the butler appeared. When I asked him if
he knew what had befallen it, he turned pale, and assured me he did not.
I could less easily doubt his word than my own eyes, for he had been all
his life in the family, and a more faithful servant never lived. He left
on me the impression, nevertheless, that he could have said something
more.

In the afternoon I was again reading in the library, and coming to a
point which demanded reflection, I lowered the book and let my eyes go
wandering. The same moment I saw the back of a slender old man, in a
long, dark coat, shiny as from much wear, in the act of disappearing
through the masked door into the closet beyond. I darted across the
room, found the door shut, pulled it open, looked into the closet,
which had no other issue, and, seeing nobody, concluded, not without
uneasiness, that I had had a recurrence of my former illusion, and sat
down again to my reading.

Naturally, however, I could not help feeling a little nervous, and
presently glancing up to assure myself that I was indeed alone,
started again to my feet, and ran to the masked door--for there was
the mutilated volume in its place! I laid hold of it and pulled: it was
firmly fixed as usual!

I was now utterly bewildered. I rang the bell; the butler came; I told
him all I had seen, and he told me all he knew.

He had hoped, he said, that the old gentleman was going to be forgotten;
it was well no one but myself had seen him. He had heard a good deal
about him when first he served in the house, but by degrees he had
ceased to be mentioned, and he had been very careful not to allude to
him.

“The place was haunted by an old gentleman, was it?” I said.

He answered that at one time everybody believed it, but the fact that I
had never heard of it seemed to imply that the thing had come to an end
and was forgotten.

I questioned him as to what he had seen of the old gentleman.

He had never seen him, he said, although he had been in the house from
the day my father was eight years old. My grandfather would never hear
a word on the matter, declaring that whoever alluded to it should be
dismissed without a moment’s warning: it was nothing but a pretext of
the maids, he said, for running into the arms of the men! but old Sir
Ralph believed in nothing he could not see or lay hold of. Not one of
the maids ever said she had seen the apparition, but a footman had left
the place because of it.

An ancient woman in the village had told him a legend concerning a Mr.
Raven, long time librarian to “that Sir Upward whose portrait hangs
there among the books.” Sir Upward was a great reader, she said--not
of such books only as were wholesome for men to read, but of strange,
forbidden, and evil books; and in so doing, Mr. Raven, who was probably
the devil himself, encouraged him. Suddenly they both disappeared, and
Sir Upward was never after seen or heard of, but Mr. Raven continued to
show himself at uncertain intervals in the library. There were some who
believed he was not dead; but both he and the old woman held it easier
to believe that a dead man might revisit the world he had left, than
that one who went on living for hundreds of years should be a man at
all.

He had never heard that Mr. Raven meddled with anything in the house,
but he might perhaps consider himself privileged in regard to the books.
How the old woman had learned so much about him he could not tell; but
the description she gave of him corresponded exactly with the figure I
had just seen.

“I hope it was but a friendly call on the part of the old gentleman!” he
concluded, with a troubled smile.

I told him I had no objection to any number of visits from Mr. Raven,
but it would be well he should keep to his resolution of saying nothing
about him to the servants. Then I asked him if he had ever seen the
mutilated volume out of its place; he answered that he never had, and
had always thought it a fixture. With that he went to it, and gave it a
pull: it seemed immovable.




CHAPTER II. THE MIRROR

Nothing more happened for some days. I think it was about a week after,
when what I have now to tell took place.

I had often thought of the manuscript fragment, and repeatedly tried
to discover some way of releasing it, but in vain: I could not find out
what held it fast.

But I had for some time intended a thorough overhauling of the books in
the closet, its atmosphere causing me uneasiness as to their condition.
One day the intention suddenly became a resolve, and I was in the act of
rising from my chair to make a beginning, when I saw the old librarian
moving from the door of the closet toward the farther end of the room.
I ought rather to say only that I caught sight of something shadowy from
which I received the impression of a slight, stooping man, in a shabby
dress-coat reaching almost to his heels, the tails of which, disparting
a little as he walked, revealed thin legs in black stockings, and large
feet in wide, slipper-like shoes.

At once I followed him: I might be following a shadow, but I never
doubted I was following something. He went out of the library into the
hall, and across to the foot of the great staircase, then up the stairs
to the first floor, where lay the chief rooms. Past these rooms, I
following close, he continued his way, through a wide corridor, to the
foot of a narrower stair leading to the second floor. Up that he went
also, and when I reached the top, strange as it may seem, I found myself
in a region almost unknown to me. I never had brother or sister to
incite to such romps as make children familiar with nook and cranny; I
was a mere child when my guardian took me away; and I had never seen the
house again until, about a month before, I returned to take possession.

Through passage after passage we came to a door at the bottom of a
winding wooden stair, which we ascended. Every step creaked under my
foot, but I heard no sound from that of my guide. Somewhere in the
middle of the stair I lost sight of him, and from the top of it the
shadowy shape was nowhere visible. I could not even imagine I saw him.
The place was full of shadows, but he was not one of them.

I was in the main garret, with huge beams and rafters over my head,
great spaces around me, a door here and there in sight, and long vistas
whose gloom was thinned by a few lurking cobwebbed windows and small
dusky skylights. I gazed with a strange mingling of awe and pleasure:
the wide expanse of garret was my own, and unexplored!

In the middle of it stood an unpainted inclosure of rough planks, the
door of which was ajar. Thinking Mr. Raven might be there, I pushed the
door, and entered.

The small chamber was full of light, but such as dwells in places
deserted: it had a dull, disconsolate look, as if it found itself of no
use, and regretted having come. A few rather dim sunrays, marking their
track through the cloud of motes that had just been stirred up,
fell upon a tall mirror with a dusty face, old-fashioned and rather
narrow--in appearance an ordinary glass. It had an ebony frame, on the
top of which stood a black eagle, with outstretched wings, in his beak a
golden chain, from whose end hung a black ball.

I had been looking at rather than into the mirror, when suddenly I
became aware that it reflected neither the chamber nor my own person. I
have an impression of having seen the wall melt away, but what followed
is enough to account for any uncertainty:--could I have mistaken for a
mirror the glass that protected a wonderful picture?

I saw before me a wild country, broken and heathy. Desolate hills of
no great height, but somehow of strange appearance, occupied the middle
distance; along the horizon stretched the tops of a far-off mountain
range; nearest me lay a tract of moorland, flat and melancholy.

Being short-sighted, I stepped closer to examine the texture of a stone
in the immediate foreground, and in the act espied, hopping toward me
with solemnity, a large and ancient raven, whose purply black was here
and there softened with gray. He seemed looking for worms as he came.
Nowise astonished at the appearance of a live creature in a picture,
I took another step forward to see him better, stumbled over
something--doubtless the frame of the mirror--and stood nose to beak
with the bird: I was in the open air, on a houseless heath!




CHAPTER III. THE RAVEN

I turned and looked behind me: all was vague and uncertain, as when
one cannot distinguish between fog and field, between cloud and
mountain-side. One fact only was plain--that I saw nothing I knew.
Imagining myself involved in a visual illusion, and that touch would
correct sight, I stretched my arms and felt about me, walking in this
direction and that, if haply, where I could see nothing, I might yet
come in contact with something; but my search was vain. Instinctively
then, as to the only living thing near me, I turned to the raven,
which stood a little way off, regarding me with an expression at once
respectful and quizzical. Then the absurdity of seeking counsel from
such a one struck me, and I turned again, overwhelmed with bewilderment,
not unmingled with fear. Had I wandered into a region where both the
material and psychical relations of our world had ceased to hold? Might
a man at any moment step beyond the realm of order, and become the sport
of the lawless? Yet I saw the raven, felt the ground under my feet, and
heard a sound as of wind in the lowly plants around me!

“How DID I get here?” I said--apparently aloud, for the question was
immediately answered.

“You came through the door,” replied an odd, rather harsh voice.

I looked behind, then all about me, but saw no human shape. The terror
that madness might be at hand laid hold upon me: must I henceforth place
no confidence either in my senses or my consciousness? The same instant
I knew it was the raven that had spoken, for he stood looking up at me
with an air of waiting. The sun was not shining, yet the bird seemed to
cast a shadow, and the shadow seemed part of himself.

I beg my reader to aid me in the endeavour to make myself
intelligible--if here understanding be indeed possible between us. I was
in a world, or call it a state of things, an economy of conditions, an
idea of existence, so little correspondent with the ways and modes of
this world--which we are apt to think the only world, that the best
choice I can make of word or phrase is but an adumbration of what
I would convey. I begin indeed to fear that I have undertaken an
impossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because no speech
at my command will fit the forms in my mind. Already I have set down
statements I would gladly change did I know how to substitute a truer
utterance; but as often as I try to fit the reality with nearer words, I
find myself in danger of losing the things themselves, and feel like one
in process of awaking from a dream, with the thing that seemed familiar
gradually yet swiftly changing through a succession of forms until its
very nature is no longer recognisable.

I bethought me that a bird capable of addressing a man must have the
right of a man to a civil answer; perhaps, as a bird, even a greater
claim.

A tendency to croak caused a certain roughness in his speech, but his
voice was not disagreeable, and what he said, although conveying little
enlightenment, did not sound rude.

“I did not come through any door,” I rejoined.

“I saw you come through it!--saw you with my own ancient eyes!” asserted
the raven, positively but not disrespectfully.

“I never saw any door!” I persisted.

“Of course not!” he returned; “all the doors you had yet seen--and you
haven’t seen many--were doors in; here you came upon a door out! The
strange thing to you,” he went on thoughtfully, “will be, that the more
doors you go out of, the farther you get in!”

“Oblige me by telling me where I am.”

“That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only way to
come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.”

“How am I to begin that where everything is so strange?”

“By doing something.”

“What?”

“Anything; and the sooner you begin the better! for until you are at
home, you will find it as difficult to get out as it is to get in.”

“I have, unfortunately, found it too easy to get in; once out I shall
not try again!”

“You have stumbled in, and may, possibly, stumble out again. Whether you
have got in UNFORTUNATELY remains to be seen.”

“Do you never go out, sir?”

“When I please I do, but not often, or for long. Your world is such
a half-baked sort of place, it is at once so childish and so
self-satisfied--in fact, it is not sufficiently developed for an old
raven--at your service!”

“Am I wrong, then, in presuming that a man is superior to a bird?”

“That is as it may be. We do not waste our intellects in generalising,
but take man or bird as we find him.--I think it is now my turn to ask
you a question!”

“You have the best of rights,” I replied, “in the fact that you CAN do
so!”

“Well answered!” he rejoined. “Tell me, then, who you are--if you happen
to know.”

“How should I help knowing? I am myself, and must know!”

“If you know you are yourself, you know that you are not somebody else;
but do you know that you are yourself? Are you sure you are not your own
father?--or, excuse me, your own fool?--Who are you, pray?”

I became at once aware that I could give him no notion of who I was.
Indeed, who was I? It would be no answer to say I was who! Then I
understood that I did not know myself, did not know what I was, had no
grounds on which to determine that I was one and not another. As for the
name I went by in my own world, I had forgotten it, and did not care to
recall it, for it meant nothing, and what it might be was plainly of
no consequence here. I had indeed almost forgotten that there it was a
custom for everybody to have a name! So I held my peace, and it was my
wisdom; for what should I say to a creature such as this raven, who saw
through accident into entity?

“Look at me,” he said, “and tell me who I am.”

As he spoke, he turned his back, and instantly I knew him. He was no
longer a raven, but a man above the middle height with a stoop, very
thin, and wearing a long black tail-coat. Again he turned, and I saw him
a raven.

“I have seen you before, sir,” I said, feeling foolish rather than
surprised.

“How can you say so from seeing me behind?” he rejoined. “Did you ever
see yourself behind? You have never seen yourself at all!--Tell me now,
then, who I am.”

“I humbly beg your pardon,” I answered: “I believe you were once the
librarian of our house, but more WHO I do not know.”

“Why do you beg my pardon?”

“Because I took you for a raven,” I said--seeing him before me as
plainly a raven as bird or man could look.

“You did me no wrong,” he returned. “Calling me a raven, or thinking me
one, you allowed me existence, which is the sum of what one can
demand of his fellow-beings. Therefore, in return, I will give you a
lesson:--No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he IS,
and then what HIMSELF is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself is
nobody. There is more in it than you can see now, but not more than you
need to see. You have, I fear, got into this region too soon, but none
the less you must get to be at home in it; for home, as you may or
may not know, is the only place where you can go out and in. There are
places you can go into, and places you can go out of; but the one place,
if you do but find it, where you may go out and in both, is home.”

He turned to walk away, and again I saw the librarian. He did not appear
to have changed, only to have taken up his shadow. I know this seems
nonsense, but I cannot help it.

I gazed after him until I saw him no more; but whether distance hid him,
or he disappeared among the heather, I cannot tell.

Could it be that I was dead, I thought, and did not know it? Was I in
what we used to call the world beyond the grave? and must I wander about
seeking my place in it? How was I to find myself at home? The raven
said I must do something: what could I do here?--And would that make me
somebody? for now, alas, I was nobody!

I took the way Mr. Raven had gone, and went slowly after him. Presently
I saw a wood of tall slender pine-trees, and turned toward it. The odour
of it met me on my way, and I made haste to bury myself in it.

Plunged at length in its twilight glooms, I spied before me something
with a shine, standing between two of the stems. It had no colour,
but was like the translucent trembling of the hot air that rises, in a
radiant summer noon, from the sun-baked ground, vibrant like the smitten
chords of a musical instrument. What it was grew no plainer as I went
nearer, and when I came close up, I ceased to see it, only the form
and colour of the trees beyond seemed strangely uncertain. I would have
passed between the stems, but received a slight shock, stumbled,
and fell. When I rose, I saw before me the wooden wall of the garret
chamber. I turned, and there was the mirror, on whose top the black
eagle seemed but that moment to have perched.

Terror seized me, and I fled. Outside the chamber the wide garret
spaces had an UNCANNY look. They seemed to have long been waiting for
something; it had come, and they were waiting again! A shudder went
through me on the winding stair: the house had grown strange to me!
something was about to leap upon me from behind! I darted down the
spiral, struck against the wall and fell, rose and ran. On the next
floor I lost my way, and had gone through several passages a second time
ere I found the head of the stair. At the top of the great stair I had
come to myself a little, and in a few moments I sat recovering my breath
in the library.

Nothing should ever again make me go up that last terrible stair!
The garret at the top of it pervaded the whole house! It sat upon it,
threatening to crush me out of it! The brooding brain of the building,
it was full of mysterious dwellers, one or other of whom might any
moment appear in the library where I sat! I was nowhere safe! I would
let, I would sell the dreadful place, in which an aërial portal stood
ever open to creatures whose life was other than human! I would purchase
a crag in Switzerland, and thereon build a wooden nest of one story with
never a garret above it, guarded by some grand old peak that would send
down nothing worse than a few tons of whelming rock!

I knew all the time that my thinking was foolish, and was even aware of
a certain undertone of contemptuous humour in it; but suddenly it was
checked, and I seemed again to hear the croak of the raven.

“If I know nothing of my own garret,” I thought, “what is there
to secure me against my own brain? Can I tell what it is even now
generating?--what thought it may present me the next moment, the next
month, or a year away? What is at the heart of my brain? What is behind
my THINK? Am I there at all?--Who, what am I?”

I could no more answer the question now than when the raven put it to
me in--at--“Where in?--where at?” I said, and gave myself up as knowing
anything of myself or the universe.

I started to my feet, hurried across the room to the masked door, where
the mutilated volume, sticking out from the flat of soulless, bodiless,
non-existent books, appeared to beckon me, went down on my knees, and
opened it as far as its position would permit, but could see nothing. I
got up again, lighted a taper, and peeping as into a pair of reluctant
jaws, perceived that the manuscript was verse. Further I could not carry
discovery. Beginnings of lines were visible on the left-hand page,
and ends of lines on the other; but I could not, of course, get at the
beginning and end of a single line, and was unable, in what I could
read, to make any guess at the sense. The mere words, however, woke in
me feelings which to describe was, from their strangeness, impossible.
Some dreams, some poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wake
feelings such as one never had before, new in colour and form--spiritual
sensations, as it were, hitherto unproved: here, some of the phrases,
some of the senseless half-lines, some even of the individual words
affected me in similar fashion--as with the aroma of an idea, rousing
in me a great longing to know what the poem or poems might, even yet in
their mutilation, hold or suggest.

I copied out a few of the larger shreds attainable, and tried hard to
complete some of the lines, but without the least success. The only
thing I gained in the effort was so much weariness that, when I went to
bed, I fell asleep at once and slept soundly.

In the morning all that horror of the empty garret spaces had left me.




CHAPTER IV. SOMEWHERE OR NOWHERE?

The sun was very bright, but I doubted if the day would long be fine,
and looked into the milky sapphire I wore, to see whether the star in it
was clear. It was even less defined than I had expected. I rose from the
breakfast-table, and went to the window to glance at the stone again.
There had been heavy rain in the night, and on the lawn was a thrush
breaking his way into the shell of a snail.

As I was turning my ring about to catch the response of the star to the
sun, I spied a keen black eye gazing at me out of the milky misty blue.
The sight startled me so that I dropped the ring, and when I picked it
up the eye was gone from it. The same moment the sun was obscured;
a dark vapour covered him, and in a minute or two the whole sky was
clouded. The air had grown sultry, and a gust of wind came suddenly.
A moment more and there was a flash of lightning, with a single sharp
thunder-clap. Then the rain fell in torrents.

I had opened the window, and stood there looking out at the precipitous
rain, when I descried a raven walking toward me over the grass, with
solemn gait, and utter disregard of the falling deluge. Suspecting who
he was, I congratulated myself that I was safe on the ground-floor. At
the same time I had a conviction that, if I were not careful, something
would happen.

He came nearer and nearer, made a profound bow, and with a sudden winged
leap stood on the window-sill. Then he stepped over the ledge, jumped
down into the room, and walked to the door. I thought he was on his way
to the library, and followed him, determined, if he went up the stair,
not to take one step after him. He turned, however, neither toward the
library nor the stair, but to a little door that gave upon a grass-patch
in a nook between two portions of the rambling old house. I made haste
to open it for him. He stepped out into its creeper-covered porch, and
stood looking at the rain, which fell like a huge thin cataract; I stood
in the door behind him. The second flash came, and was followed by a
lengthened roll of more distant thunder. He turned his head over his
shoulder and looked at me, as much as to say, “You hear that?” then
swivelled it round again, and anew contemplated the weather, apparently
with approbation. So human were his pose and carriage and the way he
kept turning his head, that I remarked almost involuntarily,

“Fine weather for the worms, Mr. Raven!”

“Yes,” he answered, in the rather croaky voice I had learned to know,
“the ground will be nice for them to get out and in!--It must be a
grand time on the steppes of Uranus!” he added, with a glance upward; “I
believe it is raining there too; it was, all the last week!”

“Why should that make it a grand time?” I asked.

“Because the animals there are all burrowers,” he answered, “--like the
field-mice and the moles here.--They will be, for ages to come.”

“How do you know that, if I may be so bold?” I rejoined.

“As any one would who had been there to see,” he replied. “It is a great
sight, until you get used to it, when the earth gives a heave, and
out comes a beast. You might think it a hairy elephant or a
deinotherium--but none of the animals are the same as we have ever
had here. I was almost frightened myself the first time I saw the
dry-bog-serpent come wallowing out--such a head and mane! and SUCH
eyes!--but the shower is nearly over. It will stop directly after the
next thunder-clap. There it is!”

A flash came with the words, and in about half a minute the thunder.
Then the rain ceased.

“Now we should be going!” said the raven, and stepped to the front of
the porch.

“Going where?” I asked.

“Going where we have to go,” he answered. “You did not surely think you
had got home? I told you there was no going out and in at pleasure until
you were at home!”

“I do not want to go,” I said.

“That does not make any difference--at least not much,” he answered.
“This is the way!”

“I am quite content where I am.”

“You think so, but you are not. Come along.”

He hopped from the porch onto the grass, and turned, waiting.

“I will not leave the house to-day,” I said with obstinacy.

“You will come into the garden!” rejoined the raven.

“I give in so far,” I replied, and stepped from the porch.

The sun broke through the clouds, and the raindrops flashed and sparkled
on the grass. The raven was walking over it.

“You will wet your feet!” I cried.

“And mire my beak,” he answered, immediately plunging it deep in the
sod, and drawing out a great wriggling red worm. He threw back his head,
and tossed it in the air. It spread great wings, gorgeous in red and
black, and soared aloft.

“Tut! tut!” I exclaimed; “you mistake, Mr. Raven: worms are not the
larvæ of butterflies!”

“Never mind,” he croaked; “it will do for once! I’m not a reading man
at present, but sexton at the--at a certain graveyard--cemetery, more
properly--in--at--no matter where!”

“I see! you can’t keep your spade still: and when you have nothing to
bury, you must dig something up! Only you should mind what it is before
you make it fly! No creature should be allowed to forget what and where
it came from!”

“Why?” said the raven.

“Because it will grow proud, and cease to recognise its superiors.”

No man knows it when he is making an idiot of himself.

“Where DO the worms come from?” said the raven, as if suddenly grown
curious to know.

“Why, from the earth, as you have just seen!” I answered.

“Yes, last!” he replied. “But they can’t have come from it first--for
that will never go back to it!” he added, looking up.

I looked up also, but could see nothing save a little dark cloud, the
edges of which were red, as if with the light of the sunset.

“Surely the sun is not going down!” I exclaimed, struck with amazement.

“Oh, no!” returned the raven. “That red belongs to the worm.”

“You see what comes of making creatures forget their origin!” I cried
with some warmth.

“It is well, surely, if it be to rise higher and grow larger!” he
returned. “But indeed I only teach them to find it!”

“Would you have the air full of worms?”

“That is the business of a sexton. If only the rest of the clergy
understood it as well!”

In went his beak again through the soft turf, and out came the wriggling
worm. He tossed it in the air, and away it flew.

I looked behind me, and gave a cry of dismay: I had but that moment
declared I would not leave the house, and already I was a stranger in
the strange land!

“What right have you to treat me so, Mr. Raven?” I said with deep
offence. “Am I, or am I not, a free agent?”

“A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer,”
 answered the raven.

“You have no right to make me do things against my will!”

“When you have a will, you will find that no one can.”

“You wrong me in the very essence of my individuality!” I persisted.

“If you were an individual I could not, therefore now I do not. You are
but beginning to become an individual.”

All about me was a pine-forest, in which my eyes were already searching
deep, in the hope of discovering an unaccountable glimmer, and so
finding my way home. But, alas! how could I any longer call that house
HOME, where every door, every window opened into OUT, and even the
garden I could not keep inside!

I suppose I looked discomfited.

“Perhaps it may comfort you,” said the raven, “to be told that you have
not yet left your house, neither has your house left you. At the same
time it cannot contain you, or you inhabit it!”

“I do not understand you,” I replied. “Where am I?”

“In the region of the seven dimensions,” he answered, with a curious
noise in his throat, and a flutter of his tail. “You had better follow
me carefully now for a moment, lest you should hurt some one!”

“There is nobody to hurt but yourself, Mr. Raven! I confess I should
rather like to hurt you!”

“That you see nobody is where the danger lies. But you see that large
tree to your left, about thirty yards away?”

“Of course I do: why should I not?” I answered testily.

“Ten minutes ago you did not see it, and now you do not know where it
stands!”

“I do.”

“Where do you think it stands?”

“Why THERE, where you know it is!”

“Where is THERE?”

“You bother me with your silly questions!” I cried. “I am growing tired
of you!”

“That tree stands on the hearth of your kitchen, and grows nearly
straight up its chimney,” he said.

“Now I KNOW you are making game of me!” I answered, with a laugh of
scorn.

“Was I making game of you when you discovered me looking out of your
star-sapphire yesterday?”

“That was this morning--not an hour ago!”

“I have been widening your horizon longer than that, Mr. Vane; but never
mind!”

“You mean you have been making a fool of me!” I said, turning from him.

“Excuse me: no one can do that but yourself!”

“And I decline to do it.”

“You mistake.”

“How?”

“In declining to acknowledge yourself one already. You make yourself
such by refusing what is true, and for that you will sorely punish
yourself.”

“How, again?”

“By believing what is not true.”

“Then, if I walk to the other side of that tree, I shall walk through
the kitchen fire?”

“Certainly. You would first, however, walk through the lady at the piano
in the breakfast-room. That rosebush is close by her. You would give her
a terrible start!”

“There is no lady in the house!”

“Indeed! Is not your housekeeper a lady? She is counted such in a
certain country where all are servants, and the liveries one and
multitudinous!”

“She cannot use the piano, anyhow!”

“Her niece can: she is there--a well-educated girl and a capital
musician.”

“Excuse me; I cannot help it: you seem to me to be talking sheer
nonsense!”

“If you could but hear the music! Those great long heads of wild
hyacinth are inside the piano, among the strings of it, and give that
peculiar sweetness to her playing!--Pardon me: I forgot your deafness!”

“Two objects,” I said, “cannot exist in the same place at the same
time!”

“Can they not? I did not know!--I remember now they do teach that with
you. It is a great mistake--one of the greatest ever wiseacre made! No
man of the universe, only a man of the world could have said so!”

“You a librarian, and talk such rubbish!” I cried. “Plainly, you did not
read many of the books in your charge!”

“Oh, yes! I went through all in your library--at the time, and came out
at the other side not much the wiser. I was a bookworm then, but when I
came to know it, I woke among the butterflies. To be sure I have given
up reading for a good many years--ever since I was made sexton.--There!
I smell Grieg’s Wedding March in the quiver of those rose-petals!”

I went to the rose-bush and listened hard, but could not hear the
thinnest ghost of a sound; I only smelt something I had never before
smelt in any rose. It was still rose-odour, but with a difference,
caused, I suppose, by the Wedding March.

When I looked up, there was the bird by my side.

“Mr. Raven,” I said, “forgive me for being so rude: I was irritated.
Will you kindly show me my way home? I must go, for I have an
appointment with my bailiff. One must not break faith with his
servants!”

“You cannot break what was broken days ago!” he answered.

“Do show me the way,” I pleaded.

“I cannot,” he returned. “To go back, you must go through yourself, and
that way no man can show another.”

Entreaty was vain. I must accept my fate! But how was life to be lived
in a world of which I had all the laws to learn? There would, however,
be adventure! that held consolation; and whether I found my way home or
not, I should at least have the rare advantage of knowing two worlds!

I had never yet done anything to justify my existence; my former world
was nothing the better for my sojourn in it: here, however, I must earn,
or in some way find, my bread! But I reasoned that, as I was not to
blame in being here, I might expect to be taken care of here as well as
there! I had had nothing to do with getting into the world I had just
left, and in it I had found myself heir to a large property! If that
world, as I now saw, had a claim upon me because I had eaten, and could
eat again, upon this world I had a claim because I must eat--when it
would in return have a claim on me!

“There is no hurry,” said the raven, who stood regarding me; “we do not
go much by the clock here. Still, the sooner one begins to do what has
to be done, the better! I will take you to my wife.”

“Thank you. Let us go!” I answered, and immediately he led the way.




CHAPTER V. THE OLD CHURCH

I followed him deep into the pine-forest. Neither of us said much while
yet the sacred gloom of it closed us round. We came to larger and yet
larger trees--older, and more individual, some of them grotesque with
age. Then the forest grew thinner.

“You see that hawthorn?” said my guide at length, pointing with his
beak.

I looked where the wood melted away on the edge of an open heath.

“I see a gnarled old man, with a great white head,” I answered.

“Look again,” he rejoined: “it is a hawthorn.”

“It seems indeed an ancient hawthorn; but this is not the season for the
hawthorn to blossom!” I objected.

“The season for the hawthorn to blossom,” he replied, “is when the
hawthorn blossoms. That tree is in the ruins of the church on your
home-farm. You were going to give some directions to the bailiff about
its churchyard, were you not, the morning of the thunder?”

“I was going to tell him I wanted it turned into a wilderness of
rose-trees, and that the plough must never come within three yards of
it.”

“Listen!” said the raven, seeming to hold his breath.

I listened, and heard--was it the sighing of a far-off musical wind--or
the ghost of a music that had once been glad? Or did I indeed hear
anything?

“They go there still,” said the raven.

“Who goes there? and where do they go?” I asked.

“Some of the people who used to pray there, go to the ruins still,” he
replied. “But they will not go much longer, I think.”

“What makes them go now?”

“They need help from each other to get their thinking done, and their
feelings hatched, so they talk and sing together; and then, they say,
the big thought floats out of their hearts like a great ship out of the
river at high water.”

“Do they pray as well as sing?”

“No; they have found that each can best pray in his own silent
heart.--Some people are always at their prayers.--Look! look! There goes
one!”

He pointed right up into the air. A snow-white pigeon was mounting, with
quick and yet quicker wing-flap, the unseen spiral of an ethereal stair.
The sunshine flashed quivering from its wings.

“I see a pigeon!” I said.

“Of course you see a pigeon,” rejoined the raven, “for there is the
pigeon! I see a prayer on its way.--I wonder now what heart is that
dove’s mother! Some one may have come awake in my cemetery!”

“How can a pigeon be a prayer?” I said. “I understand, of course, how
it should be a fit symbol or likeness for one; but a live pigeon to come
out of a heart!”

“It MUST puzzle you! It cannot fail to do so!”

“A prayer is a thought, a thing spiritual!” I pursued.

“Very true! But if you understood any world besides your own, you would
understand your own much better.--When a heart is really alive, then it
is able to think live things. There is one heart all whose thoughts
are strong, happy creatures, and whose very dreams are lives. When some
pray, they lift heavy thoughts from the ground, only to drop them on it
again; others send up their prayers in living shapes, this or that, the
nearest likeness to each. All live things were thoughts to begin with,
and are fit therefore to be used by those that think. When one says to
the great Thinker:--‘Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now!’
that is a prayer--a word to the big heart from one of its own little
hearts.--Look, there is another!”

This time the raven pointed his beak downward--to something at the foot
of a block of granite. I looked, and saw a little flower. I had never
seen one like it before, and cannot utter the feeling it woke in me by
its gracious, trusting form, its colour, and its odour as of a new world
that was yet the old. I can only say that it suggested an anemone, was
of a pale rose-hue, and had a golden heart.

“That is a prayer-flower,” said the raven.

“I never saw such a flower before!” I rejoined.

“There is no other such. Not one prayer-flower is ever quite like
another,” he returned.

“How do you know it a prayer-flower?” I asked.

“By the expression of it,” he answered. “More than that I cannot tell
you. If you know it, you know it; if you do not, you do not.”

“Could you not teach me to know a prayer-flower when I see it?” I said.

“I could not. But if I could, what better would you be? you would not
know it of YOURSELF and ITself! Why know the name of a thing when the
thing itself you do not know? Whose work is it but your own to open your
eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of
you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!”

But I did see that the flower was different from any flower I had ever
seen before; therefore I knew that I must be seeing a shadow of the
prayer in it; and a great awe came over me to think of the heart
listening to the flower.




CHAPTER VI. THE SEXTON’S COTTAGE

We had been for some time walking over a rocky moorland covered with
dry plants and mosses, when I descried a little cottage in the farthest
distance. The sun was not yet down, but he was wrapt in a gray cloud.
The heath looked as if it had never been warm, and the wind blew
strangely cold, as if from some region where it was always night.

“Here we are at last!” said the raven. “What a long way it is! In half
the time I could have gone to Paradise and seen my cousin--him, you
remember, who never came back to Noah! Dear! dear! it is almost winter!”

“Winter!” I cried; “it seems but half a day since we left home!”

“That is because we have travelled so fast,” answered the raven. “In
your world you cannot pull up the plumb-line you call gravitation, and
let the world spin round under your feet! But here is my wife’s house!
She is very good to let me live with her, and call it the sexton’s
cottage!”

“But where is your churchyard--your cemetery--where you make your
graves, I mean?” said I, seeing nothing but the flat heath.

The raven stretched his neck, held out his beak horizontally, turned it
slowly round to all the points of the compass, and said nothing.

I followed the beak with my eyes, and lo, without church or graves, all
was a churchyard! Wherever the dreary wind swept, there was the raven’s
cemetery! He was sexton of all he surveyed! lord of all that was laid
aside! I stood in the burial-ground of the universe; its compass the
unenclosed heath, its wall the gray horizon, low and starless! I had
left spring and summer, autumn and sunshine behind me, and come to the
winter that waited for me! I had set out in the prime of my youth, and
here I was already!--But I mistook. The day might well be long in that
region, for it contained the seasons. Winter slept there, the night
through, in his winding-sheet of ice; with childlike smile, Spring came
awake in the dawn; at noon, Summer blazed abroad in her gorgeous beauty;
with the slow-changing afternoon, old Autumn crept in, and died at the
first breath of the vaporous, ghosty night.

As we drew near the cottage, the clouded sun was rushing down the
steepest slope of the west, and he sank while we were yet a few yards
from the door. The same instant I was assailed by a cold that seemed
almost a material presence, and I struggled across the threshold as if
from the clutches of an icy death. A wind swelled up on the moor, and
rushed at the door as with difficulty I closed it behind me. Then all
was still, and I looked about me.

A candle burned on a deal table in the middle of the room, and the first
thing I saw was the lid of a coffin, as I thought, set up against the
wall; but it opened, for it was a door, and a woman entered. She was all
in white--as white as new-fallen snow; and her face was as white as her
dress, but not like snow, for at once it suggested warmth. I thought her
features were perfect, but her eyes made me forget them. The life of
her face and her whole person was gathered and concentrated in her eyes,
where it became light. It might have been coming death that made her
face luminous, but the eyes had life in them for a nation--large, and
dark with a darkness ever deepening as I gazed. A whole night-heaven
lay condensed in each pupil; all the stars were in its blackness, and
flashed; while round it for a horizon lay coiled an iris of the eternal
twilight. What any eye IS, God only knows: her eyes must have been
coming direct out of his own! the still face might be a primeval
perfection; the live eyes were a continuous creation.

“Here is Mr. Vane, wife!” said the raven.

“He is welcome,” she answered, in a low, rich, gentle voice. Treasures
of immortal sound seemed to be buried in it.

I gazed, and could not speak.

“I knew you would be glad to see him!” added the raven.

She stood in front of the door by which she had entered, and did not
come nearer.

“Will he sleep?” she asked.

“I fear not,” he replied; “he is neither weary nor heavy laden.”

“Why then have you brought him?”

“I have my fears it may prove precipitate.”

“I do not quite understand you,” I said, with an uneasy foreboding as to
what she meant, but a vague hope of some escape. “Surely a man must do a
day’s work first!”

I gazed into the white face of the woman, and my heart fluttered. She
returned my gaze in silence.

“Let me first go home,” I resumed, “and come again after I have found or
made, invented, or at least discovered something!”

“He has not yet learned that the day begins with sleep!” said the
woman, turning to her husband. “Tell him he must rest before he can do
anything!”

“Men,” he answered, “think so much of having done, that they fall asleep
upon it. They cannot empty an egg but they turn into the shell, and lie
down!”

The words drew my eyes from the woman to the raven.

I saw no raven, but the librarian--the same slender elderly man, in a
rusty black coat, large in the body and long in the tails. I had seen
only his back before; now for the first time I saw his face. It was
so thin that it showed the shape of the bones under it, suggesting the
skulls his last-claimed profession must have made him familiar with. But
in truth I had never before seen a face so alive, or a look so keen or
so friendly as that in his pale blue eyes, which yet had a haze about
them as if they had done much weeping.

“You knew I was not a raven!” he said with a smile.

“I knew you were Mr. Raven,” I replied; “but somehow I thought you a
bird too!”

“What made you think me a bird?”

“You looked a raven, and I saw you dig worms out of the earth with your
beak.”

“And then?”

“Toss them in the air.” “And then?”

“They grew butterflies, and flew away.”

“Did you ever see a raven do that? I told you I was a sexton!”

“Does a sexton toss worms in the air, and turn them into butterflies?”

“Yes.”

“I never saw one do it!”

“You saw me do it!--But I am still librarian in your house, for I never
was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as
well.”

“But you have just told me you were sexton here!”

“So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton,
books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!”

“You bewilder me!”

“That’s all right!”

A few moments he stood silent. The woman, moveless as a statue, stood
silent also by the coffin-door.

“Upon occasion,” said the sexton at length, “it is more convenient to
put one’s bird-self in front. Every one, as you ought to know, has a
beast-self--and a bird-self, and a stupid fish-self, ay, and a creeping
serpent-self too--which it takes a deal of crushing to kill! In truth
he has also a tree-self and a crystal-self, and I don’t know how many
selves more--all to get into harmony. You can tell what sort a man is by
his creature that comes oftenest to the front.”

He turned to his wife, and I considered him more closely. He was above
the ordinary height, and stood more erect than when last I saw him. His
face was, like his wife’s, very pale; its nose handsomely encased the
beak that had retired within it; its lips were very thin, and even they
had no colour, but their curves were beautiful, and about them quivered
a shadowy smile that had humour in it as well as love and pity.

“We are in want of something to eat and drink, wife,” he said; “we have
come a long way!”

“You know, husband,” she answered, “we can give only to him that asks.”

She turned her unchanging face and radiant eyes upon mine.

“Please give me something to eat, Mrs. Raven,” I said, “and
something--what you will--to quench my thirst.”

“Your thirst must be greater before you can have what will quench it,”
 she replied; “but what I can give you, I will gladly.”

She went to a cupboard in the wall, brought from it bread and wine, and
set them on the table.

We sat down to the perfect meal; and as I ate, the bread and wine
seemed to go deeper than the hunger and thirst. Anxiety and discomfort
vanished; expectation took their place.

I grew very sleepy, and now first felt weary.

“I have earned neither food nor sleep, Mrs. Raven,” I said, “but you
have given me the one freely, and now I hope you will give me the other,
for I sorely need it.”

“Sleep is too fine a thing ever to be earned,” said the sexton; “it must
be given and accepted, for it is a necessity. But it would be perilous
to use this house as a half-way hostelry--for the repose of a night,
that is, merely.”

A wild-looking little black cat jumped on his knee as he spoke. He
patted it as one pats a child to make it go to sleep: he seemed to me
patting down the sod upon a grave--patting it lovingly, with an inward
lullaby.

“Here is one of Mara’s kittens!” he said to his wife: “will you give it
something and put it out? she may want it!”

The woman took it from him gently, gave it a little piece of bread, and
went out with it, closing the door behind her.

“How then am I to make use of your hospitality?” I asked.

“By accepting it to the full,” he answered.

“I do not understand.”

“In this house no one wakes of himself.”

“Why?”

“Because no one anywhere ever wakes of himself. You can wake yourself no
more than you can make yourself.”

“Then perhaps you or Mrs. Raven would kindly call me!” I said, still
nowise understanding, but feeling afresh that vague foreboding.

“We cannot.”

“How dare I then go to sleep?” I cried.

“If you would have the rest of this house, you must not trouble yourself
about waking. You must go to sleep heartily, altogether and outright.”
 My soul sank within me.

The sexton sat looking me in the face. His eyes seemed to say, “Will you
not trust me?” I returned his gaze, and answered,

“I will.”

“Then come,” he said; “I will show you your couch.”

As we rose, the woman came in. She took up the candle, turned to the
inner door, and led the way. I went close behind her, and the sexton
followed.




CHAPTER VII. THE CEMETERY

The air as of an ice-house met me crossing the threshold. The door
fell-to behind us. The sexton said something to his wife that made her
turn toward us.--What a change had passed upon her! It was as if the
splendour of her eyes had grown too much for them to hold, and, sinking
into her countenance, made it flash with a loveliness like that of
Beatrice in the white rose of the redeemed. Life itself, life eternal,
immortal, streamed from it, an unbroken lightning. Even her hands
shone with a white radiance, every “pearl-shell helmet” gleaming like
a moonstone. Her beauty was overpowering; I was glad when she turned it
from me.

But the light of the candle reached such a little way, that at first I
could see nothing of the place. Presently, however, it fell on something
that glimmered, a little raised from the floor. Was it a bed? Could
live thing sleep in such a mortal cold? Then surely it was no wonder
it should not wake of itself! Beyond that appeared a fainter shine; and
then I thought I descried uncertain gleams on every side.

A few paces brought us to the first; it was a human form under a sheet,
straight and still--whether of man or woman I could not tell, for the
light seemed to avoid the face as we passed.

I soon perceived that we were walking along an aisle of couches, on
almost every one of which, with its head to the passage, lay something
asleep or dead, covered with a sheet white as snow. My soul grew
silent with dread. Through aisle after aisle we went, among couches
innumerable. I could see only a few of them at once, but they were on
all sides, vanishing, as it seemed, in the infinite.--Was it here lay my
choice of a bed? Must I go to sleep among the unwaking, with no one to
rouse me? Was this the sexton’s library? were these his books? Truly it
was no half-way house, this chamber of the dead!

“One of the cellars I am placed to watch!” remarked Mr. Raven--in a low
voice, as if fearing to disturb his silent guests. “Much wine is set
here to ripen!--But it is dark for a stranger!” he added.

“The moon is rising; she will soon be here,” said his wife, and her
clear voice, low and sweet, sounded of ancient sorrow long bidden adieu.

Even as she spoke the moon looked in at an opening in the wall, and a
thousand gleams of white responded to her shine. But not yet could I
descry beginning or end of the couches. They stretched away and away, as
if for all the disparted world to sleep upon. For along the far receding
narrow ways, every couch stood by itself, and on each slept a lonely
sleeper. I thought at first their sleep was death, but I soon saw it was
something deeper still--a something I did not know.

The moon rose higher, and shone through other openings, but I could
never see enough of the place at once to know its shape or character;
now it would resemble a long cathedral nave, now a huge barn made into
a dwelling of tombs. She looked colder than any moon in the frostiest
night of the world, and where she shone direct upon them, cast a bluish,
icy gleam on the white sheets and the pallid countenances--but it might
be the faces that made the moon so cold!

Of such as I could see, all were alike in the brotherhood of death, all
unlike in the character and history recorded upon them. Here lay a man
who had died--for although this was not death, I have no other name to
give it--in the prime of manly strength; his dark beard seemed to flow
like a liberated stream from the glacier of his frozen countenance; his
forehead was smooth as polished marble; a shadow of pain lingered about
his lips, but only a shadow. On the next couch lay the form of a girl,
passing lovely to behold. The sadness left on her face by parting was
not yet absorbed in perfect peace, but absolute submission possessed the
placid features, which bore no sign of wasting disease, of “killing care
or grief of heart”: if pain had been there, it was long charmed asleep,
never again to wake. Many were the beautiful that there lay very
still--some of them mere children; but I did not see one infant. The
most beautiful of all was a lady whose white hair, and that alone,
suggested her old when first she fell asleep. On her stately countenance
rested--not submission, but a right noble acquiescence, an assurance,
firm as the foundations of the universe, that all was as it should
be. On some faces lingered the almost obliterated scars of strife, the
marrings of hopeless loss, the fading shadows of sorrows that had seemed
inconsolable: the aurora of the great morning had not yet quite melted
them away; but those faces were few, and every one that bore such brand
of pain seemed to plead, “Pardon me: I died only yesterday!” or, “Pardon
me: I died but a century ago!” That some had been dead for ages I knew,
not merely by their unutterable repose, but by something for which I
have neither word nor symbol.

We came at last to three empty couches, immediately beyond which lay the
form of a beautiful woman, a little past the prime of life. One of her
arms was outside the sheet, and her hand lay with the palm upward, in
its centre a dark spot. Next to her was the stalwart figure of a man of
middle age. His arm too was outside the sheet, the strong hand almost
closed, as if clenched on the grip of a sword. I thought he must be a
king who had died fighting for the truth.

“Will you hold the candle nearer, wife?” whispered the sexton, bending
down to examine the woman’s hand.

“It heals well,” he murmured to himself: “the nail found in her nothing
to hurt!”

At last I ventured to speak.

“Are they not dead?” I asked softly.

“I cannot answer you,” he replied in a subdued voice. “I almost forget
what they mean by DEAD in the old world. If I said a person was dead, my
wife would understand one thing, and you would imagine another.--This is
but one of my treasure vaults,” he went on, “and all my guests are not
laid in vaults: out there on the moor they lie thick as the leaves of a
forest after the first blast of your winter--thick, let me say rather,
as if the great white rose of heaven had shed its petals over it. All
night the moon reads their faces, and smiles.”

“But why leave them in the corrupting moonlight?” I asked.

“Our moon,” he answered, “is not like yours--the old cinder of a
burnt-out world; her beams embalm the dead, not corrupt them. You
observe that here the sexton lays his dead on the earth; he buries very
few under it! In your world he lays huge stones on them, as if to keep
them down; I watch for the hour to ring the resurrection-bell, and wake
those that are still asleep. Your sexton looks at the clock to know when
to ring the dead-alive to church; I hearken for the cock on the spire to
crow; ‘AWAKE, THOU THAT SLEEPEST, AND ARISE FROM THE DEAD!’”

I began to conclude that the self-styled sexton was in truth an insane
parson: the whole thing was too mad! But how was I to get away from it?
I was helpless! In this world of the dead, the raven and his wife were
the only living I had yet seen: whither should I turn for help? I was
lost in a space larger than imagination; for if here two things, or
any parts of them, could occupy the same space, why not twenty or ten
thousand?--But I dared not think further in that direction.

“You seem in your dead to see differences beyond my perception!” I
ventured to remark.

“None of those you see,” he answered, “are in truth quite dead yet, and
some have but just begun to come alive and die. Others had begun to die,
that is to come alive, long before they came to us; and when such are
indeed dead, that instant they will wake and leave us. Almost every
night some rise and go. But I will not say more, for I find my words
only mislead you!--This is the couch that has been waiting for you,” he
ended, pointing to one of the three.

“Why just this?” I said, beginning to tremble, and anxious by parley to
delay.

“For reasons which one day you will be glad to know,” he answered.

“Why not know them now?”

“That also you will know when you wake.”

“But these are all dead, and I am alive!” I objected, shuddering.

“Not much,” rejoined the sexton with a smile, “--not nearly enough!
Blessed be the true life that the pauses between its throbs are not
death!”

“The place is too cold to let one sleep!” I said.

“Do these find it so?” he returned. “They sleep well--or will soon. Of
cold they feel not a breath: it heals their wounds.--Do not be a coward,
Mr. Vane. Turn your back on fear, and your face to whatever may come.
Give yourself up to the night, and you will rest indeed. Harm will not
come to you, but a good you cannot foreknow.”

The sexton and I stood by the side of the couch, his wife, with the
candle in her hand, at the foot of it. Her eyes were full of light, but
her face was again of a still whiteness; it was no longer radiant.

“Would they have me make of a charnel-house my bed-chamber?” I cried
aloud. “I will not. I will lie abroad on the heath; it cannot be colder
there!”

“I have just told you that the dead are there also,

     ‘Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
      In Vallombrosa,’”

said the librarian.

“I will NOT,” I cried again; and in the compassing dark, the two gleamed
out like spectres that waited on the dead; neither answered me; each
stood still and sad, and looked at the other.

“Be of good comfort; we watch the flock of the great shepherd,” said the
sexton to his wife.

Then he turned to me.

“Didst thou not find the air of the place pure and sweet when thou
enteredst it?” he asked.

“Yes; but oh, so cold!” I answered.

“Then know,” he returned, and his voice was stern, “that thou who
callest thyself alive, hast brought into this chamber the odours of
death, and its air will not be wholesome for the sleepers until thou art
gone from it!”

They went farther into the great chamber, and I was left alone in the
moonlight with the dead.

I turned to escape.

What a long way I found it back through the dead! At first I was too
angry to be afraid, but as I grew calm, the still shapes grew terrible.
At last, with loud offence to the gracious silence, I ran, I fled
wildly, and, bursting out, flung-to the door behind me. It closed with
an awful silence.

I stood in pitch-darkness. Feeling about me, I found a door, opened it,
and was aware of the dim light of a lamp. I stood in my library, with
the handle of the masked door in my hand.

Had I come to myself out of a vision?--or lost myself by going back to
one? Which was the real--what I now saw, or what I had just ceased to
see? Could both be real, interpenetrating yet unmingling?

I threw myself on a couch, and fell asleep.

In the library was one small window to the east, through which, at this
time of the year, the first rays of the sun shone upon a mirror whence
they were reflected on the masked door: when I woke, there they shone,
and thither they drew my eyes. With the feeling that behind it must lie
the boundless chamber I had left by that door, I sprang to my feet,
and opened it. The light, like an eager hound, shot before me into the
closet, and pounced upon the gilded edges of a large book.

“What idiot,” I cried, “has put that book in the shelf the wrong way?”

But the gilded edges, reflecting the light a second time, flung it on
a nest of drawers in a dark corner, and I saw that one of them was half
open.

“More meddling!” I cried, and went to close the drawer.

It contained old papers, and seemed more than full, for it would
not close. Taking the topmost one out, I perceived that it was in my
father’s writing and of some length. The words on which first my eyes
fell, at once made me eager to learn what it contained. I carried it
to the library, sat down in one of the western windows, and read what
follows.




CHAPTER VIII. MY FATHER’S MANUSCRIPT

I am filled with awe of what I have to write. The sun is shining golden
above me; the sea lies blue beneath his gaze; the same world sends its
growing things up to the sun, and its flying things into the air which
I have breathed from my infancy; but I know the outspread splendour a
passing show, and that at any moment it may, like the drop-scene of a
stage, be lifted to reveal more wonderful things.

Shortly after my father’s death, I was seated one morning in the
library. I had been, somewhat listlessly, regarding the portrait that
hangs among the books, which I knew only as that of a distant ancestor,
and wishing I could learn something of its original. Then I had taken a
book from the shelves and begun to read.

Glancing up from it, I saw coming toward me--not between me and the
door, but between me and the portrait--a thin pale man in rusty black.
He looked sharp and eager, and had a notable nose, at once reminding me
of a certain jug my sisters used to call Mr. Crow.

“Finding myself in your vicinity, Mr. Vane, I have given myself the
pleasure of calling,” he said, in a peculiar but not disagreeable
voice. “Your honoured grandfather treated me--I may say it without
presumption--as a friend, having known me from childhood as his father’s
librarian.”

It did not strike me at the time how old the man must be.

“May I ask where you live now, Mr. Crow?” I said.

He smiled an amused smile.

“You nearly hit my name,” he rejoined, “which shows the family insight.
You have seen me before, but only once, and could not then have heard
it!”

“Where was that?”

“In this very room. You were quite a child, however!”

I could not be sure that I remembered him, but for a moment I fancied I
did, and I begged him to set me right as to his name.

“There is such a thing as remembering without recognising the memory in
it,” he remarked. “For my name--which you have near enough--it used to
be Raven.”

I had heard the name, for marvellous tales had brought it me.

“It is very kind of you to come and see me,” I said. “Will you not sit
down?”

He seated himself at once.

“You knew my father, then, I presume?”

“I knew him,” he answered with a curious smile, “but he did not care
about my acquaintance, and we never met.--That gentleman, however,” he
added, pointing to the portrait,--“old Sir Up’ard, his people called
him,--was in his day a friend of mine yet more intimate than ever your
grandfather became.”

Then at length I began to think the interview a strange one. But in
truth it was hardly stranger that my visitor should remember Sir Upward,
than that he should have been my great-grandfather’s librarian!

“I owe him much,” he continued; “for, although I had read many more
books than he, yet, through the special direction of his studies, he was
able to inform me of a certain relation of modes which I should never
have discovered of myself, and could hardly have learned from any one
else.”

“Would you mind telling me all about that?” I said.

“By no means--as much at least as I am able: there are not such things
as wilful secrets,” he answered--and went on.

“That closet held his library--a hundred manuscripts or so, for printing
was not then invented. One morning I sat there, working at a catalogue
of them, when he looked in at the door, and said, ‘Come.’ I laid down my
pen and followed him--across the great hall, down a steep rough descent,
and along an underground passage to a tower he had lately built,
consisting of a stair and a room at the top of it. The door of this room
had a tremendous lock, which he undid with the smallest key I ever saw.
I had scarcely crossed the threshold after him, when, to my eyes, he
began to dwindle, and grew less and less. All at once my vision seemed
to come right, and I saw that he was moving swiftly away from me. In a
minute more he was the merest speck in the distance, with the tops
of blue mountains beyond him, clear against a sky of paler blue. I
recognised the country, for I had gone there and come again many a time,
although I had never known this way to it.

“Many years after, when the tower had long disappeared, I taught one of
his descendants what Sir Upward had taught me; and now and then to this
day I use your house when I want to go the nearest way home. I must
indeed--without your leave, for which I ask your pardon--have by this
time well established a right of way through it--not from front to back,
but from bottom to top!”

“You would have me then understand, Mr. Raven,” I said, “that you go
through my house into another world, heedless of disparting space?”

“That I go through it is an incontrovertible acknowledgement of space,”
 returned the old librarian.

“Please do not quibble, Mr. Raven,” I rejoined. “Please to take my
question as you know I mean it.”

“There is in your house a door, one step through which carries me into a
world very much another than this.”

“A better?”

“Not throughout; but so much another that most of its physical, and many
of its mental laws are different from those of this world. As for moral
laws, they must everywhere be fundamentally the same.”

“You try my power of belief!” I said.

“You take me for a madman, probably?”

“You do not look like one.”

“A liar then?”

“You give me no ground to think you such.”

“Only you do not believe me?”

“I will go out of that door with you if you like: I believe in you
enough to risk the attempt.”

“The blunder all my children make!” he murmured. “The only door out is
the door in!”

I began to think he must be crazy. He sat silent for a moment, his head
resting on his hand, his elbow on the table, and his eyes on the books
before him.

“A book,” he said louder, “is a door in, and therefore a door out.--I
see old Sir Up’ard,” he went on, closing his eyes, “and my heart swells
with love to him:--what world is he in?”

“The world of your heart!” I replied; “--that is, the idea of him is
there.”

“There is one world then at least on which your hall-door does not
open?”

“I grant you so much; but the things in that world are not things to
have and to hold.”

“Think a little farther,” he rejoined: “did anything ever become yours,
except by getting into that world?--The thought is beyond you, however,
at present!--I tell you there are more worlds, and more doors to them,
than you will think of in many years!”

He rose, left the library, crossed the hall, and went straight up to
the garret, familiar evidently with every turn. I followed, studying his
back. His hair hung down long and dark, straight and glossy. His coat
was wide and reached to his heels. His shoes seemed too large for him.

In the garret a light came through at the edges of the great roofing
slabs, and showed us parts where was no flooring, and we must step from
joist to joist: in the middle of one of these spaces rose a partition,
with a door: through it I followed Mr. Raven into a small, obscure
chamber, whose top contracted as it rose, and went slanting through the
roof.

“That is the door I spoke of,” he said, pointing to an oblong mirror
that stood on the floor and leaned against the wall. I went in front
of it, and saw our figures dimly reflected in its dusty face. There
was something about it that made me uneasy. It looked old-fashioned and
neglected, but, notwithstanding its ordinary seeming, the eagle, perched
with outstretched wings on the top, appeared threatful.

“As a mirror,” said the librarian, “it has grown dingy with age; but
that is no matter: its clearness depends on the light.”

“Light!” I rejoined; “there is no light here!”

He did not answer me, but began to pull at a little chain on the
opposite wall. I heard a creaking: the top of the chamber was turning
slowly round. He ceased pulling, looked at his watch, and began to pull
again.

“We arrive almost to the moment!” he said; “it is on the very stroke of
noon!”

The top went creaking and revolving for a minute or so. Then he pulled
two other chains, now this, now that, and returned to the first. A
moment more and the chamber grew much clearer: a patch of sunlight had
fallen upon a mirror on the wall opposite that against which the other
leaned, and on the dust I saw the path of the reflected rays to the
mirror on the ground. But from the latter none were returned; they
seemed to go clean through; there was nowhere in the chamber a second
patch of light!

“Where are the sunrays gone?” I cried.

“That I cannot tell,” returned Mr. Raven; “--back, perhaps, to where
they came from first. They now belong, I fancy, to a sense not yet
developed in us.”

He then talked of the relations of mind to matter, and of senses to
qualities, in a way I could only a little understand, whence he went
on to yet stranger things which I could not at all comprehend. He spoke
much about dimensions, telling me that there were many more than three,
some of them concerned with powers which were indeed in us, but of which
as yet we knew absolutely nothing. His words, however, I confess, took
little more hold of me than the light did of the mirror, for I thought
he hardly knew what he was saying.

Suddenly I was aware that our forms had gone from the mirror, which
seemed full of a white mist. As I gazed I saw, growing gradually visible
beyond the mist, the tops of a range of mountains, which became clearer
and clearer. Soon the mist vanished entirely, uncovering the face of a
wide heath, on which, at some distance, was the figure of a man moving
swiftly away. I turned to address my companion; he was no longer by my
side. I looked again at the form in the mirror, and recognised the wide
coat flying, the black hair lifting in a wind that did not touch me. I
rushed in terror from the place.




CHAPTER IX. I REPENT

I laid the manuscript down, consoled to find that my father had had a
peep into that mysterious world, and that he knew Mr. Raven.

Then I remembered that I had never heard the cause or any circumstance
of my father’s death, and began to believe that he must at last have
followed Mr. Raven, and not come back; whereupon I speedily grew ashamed
of my flight. What wondrous facts might I not by this time have gathered
concerning life and death, and wide regions beyond ordinary perception!
Assuredly the Ravens were good people, and a night in their house would
nowise have hurt me! They were doubtless strange, but it was faculty
in which the one was peculiar, and beauty in which the other was
marvellous! And I had not believed in them! had treated them as unworthy
of my confidence, as harbouring a design against me! The more I thought
of my behaviour to them, the more disgusted I became with myself. Why
should I have feared such dead? To share their holy rest was an honour
of which I had proved myself unworthy! What harm could that sleeping
king, that lady with the wound in her palm, have done me? I fell a
longing after the sweet and stately stillness of their two countenances,
and wept. Weeping I threw myself on a couch, and suddenly fell asleep.

As suddenly I woke, feeling as if some one had called me. The house was
still as an empty church. A blackbird was singing on the lawn. I said to
myself, “I will go and tell them I am ashamed, and will do whatever
they would have me do!” I rose, and went straight up the stairs to the
garret.

The wooden chamber was just as when first I saw it, the mirror dimly
reflecting everything before it. It was nearly noon, and the sun would
be a little higher than when first I came: I must raise the hood a
little, and adjust the mirrors accordingly! If I had but been in time to
see Mr. Raven do it!

I pulled the chains, and let the light fall on the first mirror.
I turned then to the other: there were the shapes of the former
vision--distinguishable indeed, but tremulous like a landscape in a
pool ruffled by “a small pipling wind!” I touched the glass; it was
impermeable.

Suspecting polarisation as the thing required, I shifted and shifted the
mirrors, changing their relation, until at last, in a great degree, so
far as I was concerned, by chance, things came right between them, and
I saw the mountains blue and steady and clear. I stepped forward, and my
feet were among the heather.

All I knew of the way to the cottage was that we had gone through a
pine-forest. I passed through many thickets and several small fir-woods,
continually fancying afresh that I recognised something of the country;
but I had come upon no forest, and now the sun was near the horizon,
and the air had begun to grow chill with the coming winter, when, to my
delight, I saw a little black object coming toward me: it was indeed the
raven!

I hastened to meet him.

“I beg your pardon, sir, for my rudeness last night,” I said. “Will you
take me with you now? I heartily confess I do not deserve it.”

“Ah!” he returned, and looked up. Then, after a brief pause, “My wife
does not expect you to-night,” he said. “She regrets that we at all
encouraged your staying last week.”

“Take me to her that I may tell her how sorry I am,” I begged humbly.

“It is of no use,” he answered. “Your night was not come then, or you
would not have left us. It is not come now, and I cannot show you the
way. The dead were rejoicing under their daisies--they all lie among the
roots of the flowers of heaven--at the thought of your delight when the
winter should be past, and the morning with its birds come: ere you
left them, they shivered in their beds. When the spring of the universe
arrives,--but that cannot be for ages yet! how many, I do not know--and
do not care to know.”

“Tell me one thing, I beg of you, Mr. Raven: is my father with you? Have
you seen him since he left the world?”

“Yes; he is with us, fast asleep. That was he you saw with his arm on
the coverlet, his hand half closed.”

“Why did you not tell me? That I should have been so near him, and not
know!”

“And turn your back on him!” corrected the raven.

“I would have lain down at once had I known!”

“I doubt it. Had you been ready to lie down, you would have known
him!--Old Sir Up’ard,” he went on, “and your twice great-grandfather,
both are up and away long ago. Your great-grandfather has been with us
for many a year; I think he will soon begin to stir. You saw him last
night, though of course you did not know him.”

“Why OF COURSE?”

“Because he is so much nearer waking than you. No one who will not sleep
can ever wake.”

“I do not at all understand you!”

“You turned away, and would not understand!” I held my peace.--But if I
did not say something, he would go!

“And my grandfather--is he also with you?” I asked.

“No; he is still in the Evil Wood, fighting the dead.”

“Where is the Evil Wood, that I may find him?”

“You will not find him; but you will hardly miss the wood. It is the
place where those who will not sleep, wake up at night, to kill their
dead and bury them.”

“I cannot understand you!”

“Naturally not. Neither do I understand you; I can read neither your
heart nor your face. When my wife and I do not understand our children,
it is because there is not enough of them to be understood. God alone
can understand foolishness.”

“Then,” I said, feeling naked and very worthless, “will you be so good
as show me the nearest way home? There are more ways than one, I know,
for I have gone by two already.”

“There are indeed many ways.”

“Tell me, please, how to recognise the nearest.”

“I cannot,” answered the raven; “you and I use the same words with
different meanings. We are often unable to tell people what they NEED to
know, because they WANT to know something else, and would therefore only
misunderstand what we said. Home is ever so far away in the palm of your
hand, and how to get there it is of no use to tell you. But you will get
there; you must get there; you have to get there. Everybody who is not
at home, has to go home. You thought you were at home where I found you:
if that had been your home, you could not have left it. Nobody can leave
home. And nobody ever was or ever will be at home without having gone
there.”

“Enigma treading on enigma!” I exclaimed. “I did not come here to be
asked riddles.”

“No; but you came, and found the riddles waiting for you! Indeed you
are yourself the only riddle. What you call riddles are truths, and seem
riddles because you are not true.”

“Worse and worse!” I cried.

“And you MUST answer the riddles!” he continued. “They will go on asking
themselves until you understand yourself. The universe is a riddle
trying to get out, and you are holding your door hard against it.”

“Will you not in pity tell me what I am to do--where I must go?”

“How should I tell YOUR to-do, or the way to it?”

“If I am not to go home, at least direct me to some of my kind.”

“I do not know of any. The beings most like you are in that direction.”

He pointed with his beak. I could see nothing but the setting sun, which
blinded me.

“Well,” I said bitterly, “I cannot help feeling hardly treated--taken
from my home, abandoned in a strange world, and refused instruction as
to where I am to go or what I am to do!”

“You forget,” said the raven, “that, when I brought you and you declined
my hospitality, you reached what you call home in safety: now you are
come of yourself! Good night.”

He turned and walked slowly away, with his beak toward the ground. I
stood dazed. It was true I had come of myself, but had I not come with
intent of atonement? My heart was sore, and in my brain was neither
quest nor purpose, hope nor desire. I gazed after the raven, and would
have followed him, but felt it useless.

All at once he pounced on a spot, throwing the whole weight of his body
on his bill, and for some moments dug vigorously. Then with a flutter of
his wings he threw back his head, and something shot from his bill, cast
high in the air. That moment the sun set, and the air at once grew very
dusk, but the something opened into a soft radiance, and came pulsing
toward me like a fire-fly, but with a much larger and a yellower light.
It flew over my head. I turned and followed it.

Here I interrupt my narrative to remark that it involves a constant
struggle to say what cannot be said with even an approach to precision,
the things recorded being, in their nature and in that of the creatures
concerned in them, so inexpressibly different from any possible events
of this economy, that I can present them only by giving, in the forms
and language of life in this world, the modes in which they affected
me--not the things themselves, but the feelings they woke in me. Even
this much, however, I do with a continuous and abiding sense of
failure, finding it impossible to present more than one phase of a
multitudinously complicated significance, or one concentric sphere of a
graduated embodiment. A single thing would sometimes seem to be and mean
many things, with an uncertain identity at the heart of them, which kept
constantly altering their look. I am indeed often driven to set down
what I know to be but a clumsy and doubtful representation of the mere
feeling aimed at, none of the communicating media of this world being
fit to convey it, in its peculiar strangeness, with even an approach
to clearness or certainty. Even to one who knew the region better than
myself, I should have no assurance of transmitting the reality of
my experience in it. While without a doubt, for instance, that I was
actually regarding a scene of activity, I might be, at the same moment,
in my consciousness aware that I was perusing a metaphysical argument.




CHAPTER X. THE BAD BURROW

As the air grew black and the winter closed swiftly around me, the
fluttering fire blazed out more luminous, and arresting its flight,
hovered waiting. So soon as I came under its radiance, it flew slowly
on, lingering now and then above spots where the ground was rocky. Every
time I looked up, it seemed to have grown larger, and at length gave me
an attendant shadow. Plainly a bird-butterfly, it flew with a certain
swallowy double. Its wings were very large, nearly square, and flashed
all the colours of the rainbow. Wondering at their splendour, I became
so absorbed in their beauty that I stumbled over a low rock, and lay
stunned. When I came to myself, the creature was hovering over my head,
radiating the whole chord of light, with multitudinous gradations and
some kinds of colour I had never before seen. I rose and went on, but,
unable to take my eyes off the shining thing to look to my steps, I
struck my foot against a stone. Fearing then another fall, I sat down to
watch the little glory, and a great longing awoke in me to have it in my
hand. To my unspeakable delight, it began to sink toward me. Slowly at
first, then swiftly it sank, growing larger as it came nearer. I felt
as if the treasure of the universe were giving itself to me--put out my
hand, and had it. But the instant I took it, its light went out; all was
dark as pitch; a dead book with boards outspread lay cold and heavy in
my hand. I threw it in the air--only to hear it fall among the heather.
Burying my face in my hands, I sat in motionless misery.

But the cold grew so bitter that, fearing to be frozen, I got up. The
moment I was on my feet, a faint sense of light awoke in me. “Is it
coming to life?” I cried, and a great pang of hope shot through me.
Alas, no! it was the edge of a moon peering up keen and sharp over a
level horizon! She brought me light--but no guidance! SHE would not
hover over me, would not wait on my faltering steps! She could but offer
me an ignorant choice!

With a full face she rose, and I began to see a little about me.
Westward of her, and not far from me, a range of low hills broke the
horizon-line: I set out for it.

But what a night I had to pass ere I reached it! The moon seemed to know
something, for she stared at me oddly. Her look was indeed icy-cold, but
full of interest, or at least curiosity. She was not the same moon I
had known on the earth; her face was strange to me, and her light yet
stranger. Perhaps it came from an unknown sun! Every time I looked up,
I found her staring at me with all her might! At first I was annoyed,
as at the rudeness of a fellow creature; but soon I saw or fancied a
certain wondering pity in her gaze: why was I out in her night? Then
first I knew what an awful thing it was to be awake in the universe: I
WAS, and could not help it!

As I walked, my feet lost the heather, and trod a bare spongy soil,
something like dry, powdery peat. To my dismay it gave a momentary heave
under me; then presently I saw what seemed the ripple of an earthquake
running on before me, shadowy in the low moon. It passed into the
distance; but, while yet I stared after it, a single wave rose up, and
came slowly toward me. A yard or two away it burst, and from it, with a
scramble and a bound, issued an animal like a tiger. About his mouth and
ears hung clots of mould, and his eyes winked and flamed as he rushed
at me, showing his white teeth in a soundless snarl. I stood fascinated,
unconscious of either courage or fear. He turned his head to the ground,
and plunged into it.

“That moon is affecting my brain,” I said as I resumed my journey. “What
life can be here but the phantasmic--the stuff of which dreams are made?
I am indeed walking in a vain show!”

Thus I strove to keep my heart above the waters of fear, nor knew that
she whom I distrusted was indeed my defence from the realities I took
for phantoms: her light controlled the monsters, else had I scarce taken
a second step on the hideous ground. “I will not be appalled by that
which only seems!” I said to myself, yet felt it a terrible thing to
walk on a sea where such fishes disported themselves below. With that, a
step or two from me, the head of a worm began to come slowly out of the
earth, as big as that of a polar bear and much resembling it, with a
white mane to its red neck. The drawing wriggles with which its huge
length extricated itself were horrible, yet I dared not turn my eyes
from them. The moment its tail was free, it lay as if exhausted,
wallowing in feeble effort to burrow again.

“Does it live on the dead,” I wondered, “and is it unable to hurt the
living? If they scent their prey and come out, why do they leave me
unharmed?”

I know now it was that the moon paralysed them.

All the night through as I walked, hideous creatures, no two alike,
threatened me. In some of them, beauty of colour enhanced loathliness
of shape: one large serpent was covered from head to distant tail with
feathers of glorious hues.

I became at length so accustomed to their hurtless menaces that I
fell to beguiling the way with the invention of monstrosities, never
suspecting that I owed each moment of life to the staring moon. Though
hers was no primal radiance, it so hampered the evil things, that I
walked in safety. For light is yet light, if but the last of a countless
series of reflections! How swiftly would not my feet have carried me
over the restless soil, had I known that, if still within their range
when her lamp ceased to shine on the cursed spot, I should that moment
be at the mercy of such as had no mercy, the centre of a writhing heap
of hideousness, every individual of it as terrible as before it had but
seemed! Fool of ignorance, I watched the descent of the weary, solemn,
anxious moon down the widening vault above me, with no worse uneasiness
than the dread of losing my way--where as yet I had indeed no way to
lose.

I was drawing near the hills I had made my goal, and she was now not far
from their sky-line, when the soundless wallowing ceased, and the burrow
lay motionless and bare. Then I saw, slowly walking over the light soil,
the form of a woman. A white mist floated about her, now assuming, now
losing to reassume the shape of a garment, as it gathered to her or was
blown from her by a wind that dogged her steps.

She was beautiful, but with such a pride at once and misery on her
countenance that I could hardly believe what yet I saw. Up and down she
walked, vainly endeavouring to lay hold of the mist and wrap it around
her. The eyes in the beautiful face were dead, and on her left side was
a dark spot, against which she would now and then press her hand, as
if to stifle pain or sickness. Her hair hung nearly to her feet, and
sometimes the wind would so mix it with the mist that I could not
distinguish the one from the other; but when it fell gathering together
again, it shone a pale gold in the moonlight.

Suddenly pressing both hands on her heart, she fell to the ground, and
the mist rose from her and melted in the air. I ran to her. But she
began to writhe in such torture that I stood aghast. A moment more
and her legs, hurrying from her body, sped away serpents. From her
shoulders fled her arms as in terror, serpents also. Then something
flew up from her like a bat, and when I looked again, she was gone. The
ground rose like the sea in a storm; terror laid hold upon me; I turned
to the hills and ran.

I was already on the slope of their base, when the moon sank behind one
of their summits, leaving me in its shadow. Behind me rose a waste and
sickening cry, as of frustrate desire--the only sound I had heard since
the fall of the dead butterfly; it made my heart shake like a flag in
the wind. I turned, saw many dark objects bounding after me, and made
for the crest of a ridge on which the moon still shone. She seemed to
linger there that I might see to defend myself. Soon I came in sight of
her, and climbed the faster.

Crossing the shadow of a rock, I heard the creatures panting at my
heels. But just as the foremost threw himself upon me with a snarl of
greedy hate, we rushed into the moon together. She flashed out an angry
light, and he fell from me a bodiless blotch. Strength came to me, and
I turned on the rest. But one by one as they darted into the light, they
dropped with a howl; and I saw or fancied a strange smile on the round
face above me.

I climbed to the top of the ridge: far away shone the moon, sinking to
a low horizon. The air was pure and strong. I descended a little way,
found it warmer, and sat down to wait the dawn.

The moon went below, and the world again was dark.




CHAPTER XI. THE EVIL WOOD

I fell fast asleep, and when I woke the sun was rising. I went to the
top again, and looked back: the hollow I had crossed in the moonlight
lay without sign of life. Could it be that the calm expanse before me
swarmed with creatures of devouring greed?

I turned and looked over the land through which my way must lie. It
seemed a wide desert, with a patch of a different colour in the
distance that might be a forest. Sign of presence, human or animal, was
none--smoke or dust or shadow of cultivation. Not a cloud floated in
the clear heaven; no thinnest haze curtained any segment of its circling
rim.

I descended, and set out for the imaginable forest: something alive
might be there; on this side of it could not well be anything!

When I reached the plain, I found it, as far as my sight could go, of
rock, here flat and channeled, there humped and pinnacled--evidently the
wide bed of a vanished river, scored by innumerable water-runs, without
a trace of moisture in them. Some of the channels bore a dry moss, and
some of the rocks a few lichens almost as hard as themselves. The air,
once “filled with pleasant noise of waters,” was silent as death.
It took me the whole day to reach the patch,--which I found indeed a
forest--but not a rudiment of brook or runnel had I crossed! Yet through
the glowing noon I seemed haunted by an aural mirage, hearing so plainly
the voice of many waters that I could hardly believe the opposing
testimony of my eyes.

The sun was approaching the horizon when I left the river-bed, and
entered the forest. Sunk below the tree-tops, and sending his rays
between their pillar-like boles, he revealed a world of blessed shadows
waiting to receive me. I had expected a pine-wood, but here were trees
of many sorts, some with strong resemblances to trees I knew, others
with marvellous differences from any I had ever seen. I threw myself
beneath the boughs of what seemed a eucalyptus in blossom: its flowers
had a hard calyx much resembling a skull, the top of which rose like a
lid to let the froth-like bloom-brain overfoam its cup. From beneath
the shadow of its falchion-leaves my eyes went wandering into deep after
deep of the forest.

Soon, however, its doors and windows began to close, shutting up aisle
and corridor and roomier glade. The night was about me, and instant
and sharp the cold. Again what a night I found it! How shall I make my
reader share with me its wild ghostiness?

The tree under which I lay rose high before it branched, but the boughs
of it bent so low that they seemed ready to shut me in as I leaned
against the smooth stem, and let my eyes wander through the brief
twilight of the vanishing forest. Presently, to my listless roving
gaze, the varied outlines of the clumpy foliage began to assume or
imitate--say rather SUGGEST other shapes than their own. A light wind
began to blow; it set the boughs of a neighbour tree rocking, and all
their branches aswing, every twig and every leaf blending its individual
motion with the sway of its branch and the rock of its bough. Among
its leafy shapes was a pack of wolves that struggled to break from
a wizard’s leash: greyhounds would not have strained so savagely! I
watched them with an interest that grew as the wind gathered force, and
their motions life.

Another mass of foliage, larger and more compact, presented my fancy
with a group of horses’ heads and forequarters projecting caparisoned
from their stalls. Their necks kept moving up and down, with an
impatience that augmented as the growing wind broke their vertical
rhythm with a wilder swaying from side to side. What heads they were!
how gaunt, how strange!--several of them bare skulls--one with the skin
tight on its bones! One had lost the under jaw and hung low, looking
unutterably weary--but now and then hove high as if to ease the bit.
Above them, at the end of a branch, floated erect the form of a woman,
waving her arms in imperious gesture. The definiteness of these and
other leaf masses first surprised and then discomposed me: what if they
should overpower my brain with seeming reality? But the twilight became
darkness; the wind ceased; every shape was shut up in the night; I fell
asleep.

It was still dark when I began to be aware of a far-off, confused,
rushing noise, mingled with faint cries. It grew and grew until a tumult
as of gathering multitudes filled the wood. On all sides at once
the sounds drew nearer; the spot where I lay seemed the centre of a
commotion that extended throughout the forest. I scarce moved hand or
foot lest I should betray my presence to hostile things.

The moon at length approached the forest, and came slowly into it: with
her first gleam the noises increased to a deafening uproar, and I began
to see dim shapes about me. As she ascended and grew brighter, the
noises became yet louder, and the shapes clearer. A furious battle was
raging around me. Wild cries and roars of rage, shock of onset, struggle
prolonged, all mingled with words articulate, surged in my ears. Curses
and credos, snarls and sneers, laughter and mockery, sacred names and
howls of hate, came huddling in chaotic interpenetration. Skeletons and
phantoms fought in maddest confusion. Swords swept through the phantoms:
they only shivered. Maces crashed on the skeletons, shattering them
hideously: not one fell or ceased to fight, so long as a single joint
held two bones together. Bones of men and horses lay scattered and
heaped; grinding and crunching them under foot fought the skeletons.
Everywhere charged the bone-gaunt white steeds; everywhere on foot or
on wind-blown misty battle-horses, raged and ravened and raved the
indestructible spectres; weapons and hoofs clashed and crushed; while
skeleton jaws and phantom-throats swelled the deafening tumult with the
war-cry of every opinion, bad or good, that had bred strife, injustice,
cruelty in any world. The holiest words went with the most hating blow.
Lie-distorted truths flew hurtling in the wind of javelins and bones.
Every moment some one would turn against his comrades, and fight more
wildly than before, THE TRUTH! THE TRUTH! still his cry. One I noted who
wheeled ever in a circle, and smote on all sides. Wearied out, a pair
would sit for a minute side by side, then rise and renew the fierce
combat. None stooped to comfort the fallen, or stepped wide to spare
him.

The moon shone till the sun rose, and all the night long I had glimpses
of a woman moving at her will above the strife-tormented multitude, now
on this front now on that, one outstretched arm urging the fight, the
other pressed against her side. “Ye are men: slay one another!” she
shouted. I saw her dead eyes and her dark spot, and recalled what I had
seen the night before.

Such was the battle of the dead, which I saw and heard as I lay under
the tree.

Just before sunrise, a breeze went through the forest, and a voice
cried, “Let the dead bury their dead!” At the word the contending
thousands dropped noiseless, and when the sun looked in, he saw never a
bone, but here and there a withered branch.

I rose and resumed my journey, through as quiet a wood as ever grew out
of the quiet earth. For the wind of the morning had ceased when the sun
appeared, and the trees were silent. Not a bird sang, not a squirrel,
mouse, or weasel showed itself, not a belated moth flew athwart my path.
But as I went I kept watch over myself, nor dared let my eyes rest on
any forest-shape. All the time I seemed to hear faint sounds of mattock
and spade and hurtling bones: any moment my eyes might open on things I
would not see! Daylight prudence muttered that perhaps, to appear, ten
thousand phantoms awaited only my consenting fancy.

In the middle of the afternoon I came out of the wood--to find before
me a second net of dry water-courses. I thought at first that I had
wandered from my attempted line, and reversed my direction; but I soon
saw it was not so, and concluded presently that I had come to another
branch of the same river-bed. I began at once to cross it, and was in
the bottom of a wide channel when the sun set.

I sat down to await the moon, and growing sleepy, stretched myself on
the moss. The moment my head was down, I heard the sounds of rushing
streams--all sorts of sweet watery noises. The veiled melody of the
molten music sang me into a dreamless sleep, and when I woke the sun
was already up, and the wrinkled country widely visible. Covered with
shadows it lay striped and mottled like the skin of some wild animal. As
the sun rose the shadows diminished, and it seemed as if the rocks were
re-absorbing the darkness that had oozed out of them during the night.

Hitherto I had loved my Arab mare and my books more, I fear, than live
man or woman; now at length my soul was athirst for a human presence,
and I longed even after those inhabitants of this alien world whom the
raven had so vaguely described as nearest my sort. With heavy yet hoping
heart, and mind haunted by a doubt whether I was going in any direction
at all, I kept wearily travelling “north-west and by south.”




CHAPTER XII. FRIENDS AND FOES

Coming, in one of the channels, upon what seemed a little shrub, the
outlying picket, I trusted, of an army behind it, I knelt to look at
it closer. It bore a small fruit, which, as I did not recognise it,
I feared to gather and eat. Little I thought that I was watched from
behind the rocks by hundreds of eyes eager with the question whether I
would or would not take it.

I came to another plant somewhat bigger, then to another larger still,
and at length to clumps of a like sort; by which time I saw that they
were not shrubs but dwarf-trees. Before I reached the bank of this
second branch of the river-bed, I found the channels so full of them
that it was with difficulty I crossed such as I could not jump. In one
I heard a great rush, as of a multitude of birds from an ivied wall, but
saw nothing.

I came next to some large fruit-bearing trees, but what they bore looked
coarse. They stood on the edge of a hollow, which evidently had once
been the basin of a lake. From the left a forest seemed to flow into
and fill it; but while the trees above were of many sorts, those in the
hollow were almost entirely fruit-bearing.

I went a few yards down the slope of grass mingled with moss, and
stretched myself upon it weary. A little farther down stood a tiny tree
full of rosiest apples no bigger than small cherries, its top close to
my hand; I pulled and ate one of them. Finding it delicious, I was in
the act of taking another, when a sudden shouting of children, mingled
with laughter clear and sweet as the music of a brook, startled me with
delight.

“He likes our apples! He likes our apples! He’s a good giant! He’s a
good giant!” cried many little voices.

“He’s a giant!” objected one.

“He IS rather big,” assented another, “but littleness isn’t everything!
It won’t keep you from growing big and stupid except you take care!”

I rose on my elbow and stared. Above and about and below me stood a
multitude of children, apparently of all ages, some just able to run
alone, and some about twelve or thirteen. Three or four seemed older.
They stood in a small knot, a little apart, and were less excited
than the rest. The many were chattering in groups, declaiming and
contradicting, like a crowd of grown people in a city, only with greater
merriment, better manners, and more sense.

I gathered that, by the approach of my hand to a second apple, they knew
that I liked the first; but how from that they argued me good, I did not
see, nor wondered that one of them at least should suggest caution. I
did not open my mouth, for I was afraid of frightening them, and sure
I should learn more by listening than by asking questions. For I
understood nearly all they said--at which I was not surprised: to
understand is not more wonderful than to love.

There came a movement and slight dispersion among them, and presently a
sweet, innocent-looking, lovingly roguish little fellow handed me a huge
green apple. Silence fell on the noisy throng; all waited expectant.

“Eat, good giant,” he said.

I sat up, took the apple, smiled thanks, and would have eaten; but the
moment I bit into it, I flung it far away.

Again rose a shout of delight; they flung themselves upon me, so as
nearly to smother me; they kissed my face and hands; they laid hold of
my legs; they clambered about my arms and shoulders, embracing my head
and neck. I came to the ground at last, overwhelmed with the lovely
little goblins.

“Good, good giant!” they cried. “We knew you would come! Oh you dear,
good, strong giant!”

The babble of their talk sprang up afresh, and ever the jubilant shout
would rise anew from hundreds of clear little throats.

Again came a sudden silence. Those around me drew back; those atop of me
got off and began trying to set me on my feet. Upon their sweet faces,
concern had taken the place of merriment.

“Get up, good giant!” said a little girl. “Make haste! much haste! He
saw you throw his apple away!”

Before she ended, I was on my feet. She stood pointing up the slope. On
the brow of it was a clownish, bad-looking fellow, a few inches taller
than myself. He looked hostile, but I saw no reason to fear him, for he
had no weapon, and my little friends had vanished every one.

He began to descend, and I, in the hope of better footing and position,
to go up. He growled like a beast as he turned toward me.

Reaching a more level spot, I stood and waited for him. As he came near,
he held out his hand. I would have taken it in friendly fashion, but
he drew it back, threatened a blow, and held it out again. Then I
understood him to claim the apple I had flung away, whereupon I made a
grimace of dislike and a gesture of rejection.

He answered with a howl of rage that seemed to say, “Do you dare tell me
my apple was not fit to eat?”

“One bad apple may grow on the best tree,” I said.

Whether he perceived my meaning I cannot tell, but he made a stride
nearer, and I stood on my guard. He delayed his assault, however, until
a second giant, much like him, who had been stealing up behind me, was
close enough, when he rushed upon me. I met him with a good blow in the
face, but the other struck me on the back of the head, and between them
I was soon overpowered.

They dragged me into the wood above the valley, where their tribe
lived--in wretched huts, built of fallen branches and a few stones. Into
one of these they pushed me, there threw me on the ground, and kicked
me. A woman was present, who looked on with indifference.

I may here mention that during my captivity I hardly learned to
distinguish the women from the men, they differed so little. Often I
wondered whether I had not come upon a sort of fungoid people, with just
enough mind to give them motion and the expressions of anger and greed.
Their food, which consisted of tubers, bulbs, and fruits, was to me
inexpressibly disagreeable, but nothing offended them so much as to show
dislike to it. I was cuffed by the women and kicked by the men because I
would not swallow it.

I lay on the floor that night hardly able to move, but I slept a good
deal, and woke a little refreshed. In the morning they dragged me to the
valley, and tying my feet, with a long rope, to a tree, put a flat stone
with a saw-like edge in my left hand. I shifted it to the right; they
kicked me, and put it again in the left; gave me to understand that I
was to scrape the bark off every branch that had no fruit on it; kicked
me once more, and left me.

I set about the dreary work in the hope that by satisfying them I should
be left very much to myself--to make my observations and choose my time
for escape. Happily one of the dwarf-trees grew close by me, and
every other minute I plucked and ate a small fruit, which wonderfully
refreshed and strengthened me.




CHAPTER XIII. THE LITTLE ONES

I had been at work but a few moments, when I heard small voices near me,
and presently the Little Ones, as I soon found they called themselves,
came creeping out from among the tiny trees that like brushwood filled
the spaces between the big ones. In a minute there were scores and
scores about me. I made signs that the giants had but just left me,
and were not far off; but they laughed, and told me the wind was quite
clean.

“They are too blind to see us,” they said, and laughed like a multitude
of sheep-bells.

“Do you like that rope about your ankles?” asked one.

“I want them to think I cannot take it off,” I replied.

“They can scarcely see their own feet!” he rejoined. “Walk with short
steps and they will think the rope is all right.”

As he spoke, he danced with merriment.

One of the bigger girls got down on her knees to untie the clumsy knot.
I smiled, thinking those pretty fingers could do nothing with it, but in
a moment it was loose.

They then made me sit down, and fed me with delicious little fruits;
after which the smaller of them began to play with me in the wildest
fashion, so that it was impossible for me to resume my work. When the
first grew tired, others took their places, and this went on until the
sun was setting, and heavy steps were heard approaching. The little
people started from me, and I made haste to put the rope round my
ankles.

“We must have a care,” said the girl who had freed me; “a crush of one
of their horrid stumpy feet might kill a very little one!”

“Can they not perceive you at all then?”

“They might see something move; and if the children were in a heap on
the top of you, as they were a moment ago, it would be terrible; for
they hate every live thing but themselves.--Not that they are much alive
either!”

She whistled like a bird. The next instant not one of them was to be
seen or heard, and the girl herself had disappeared.

It was my master, as doubtless he counted himself, come to take me home.
He freed my ankles, and dragged me to the door of his hut; there he
threw me on the ground, again tied my feet, gave me a kick, and left me.

Now I might at once have made my escape; but at length I had friends,
and could not think of leaving them. They were so charming, so full of
winsome ways, that I must see more of them! I must know them better!
“To-morrow,” I said to myself with delight, “I shall see them again!”
 But from the moment there was silence in the huts until I fell asleep, I
heard them whispering all about me, and knew that I was lovingly watched
by a multitude. After that, I think they hardly ever left me quite
alone.

I did not come to know the giants at all, and I believe there was
scarcely anything in them to know. They never became in the least
friendly, but they were much too stupid to invent cruelties. Often I
avoided a bad kick by catching the foot and giving its owner a fall,
upon which he never, on that occasion, renewed his attempt.

But the little people were constantly doing and saying things that
pleased, often things that surprised me. Every day I grew more loath
to leave them. While I was at work, they would keep coming and going,
amusing and delighting me, and taking all the misery, and much of the
weariness out of my monotonous toil. Very soon I loved them more than
I can tell. They did not know much, but they were very wise, and seemed
capable of learning anything. I had no bed save the bare ground, but
almost as often as I woke, it was in a nest of children--one or other of
them in my arms, though which I seldom could tell until the light came,
for they ordered the succession among themselves. When one crept into my
bosom, unconsciously I clasped him there, and the rest lay close around
me, the smaller nearer. It is hardly necessary to say that I did not
suffer much from the nightly cold! The first thing they did in the
morning, and the last before sunset, was to bring the good giant plenty
to eat.

One morning I was surprised on waking to find myself alone. As I came
to my senses, however, I heard subdued sounds of approach, and presently
the girl already mentioned, the tallest and gravest of the community,
and regarded by all as their mother, appeared from the wood, followed by
the multitude in jubilation manifest--but silent lest they should rouse
the sleeping giant at whose door I lay. She carried a boy-baby in her
arms: hitherto a girl-baby, apparently about a year old, had been the
youngest. Three of the bigger girls were her nurses, but they shared
their treasure with all the rest. Among the Little Ones, dolls were
unknown; the bigger had the smaller, and the smaller the still less, to
tend and play with.

Lona came to me and laid the infant in my arms. The baby opened his eyes
and looked at me, closed them again, and fell asleep.

“He loves you already!” said the girl.

“Where did you find him?” I asked.

“In the wood, of course,” she answered, her eyes beaming with delight,
“--where we always find them. Isn’t he a beauty? We’ve been out all
night looking for him. Sometimes it is not easy to find!”

“How do you know when there is one to find?” I asked.

“I cannot tell,” she replied. “Every one makes haste to tell the other,
but we never find out who told first. Sometimes I think one must have
said it asleep, and another heard it half-awake. When there is a baby in
the wood, no one can stop to ask questions; and when we have found it,
then it is too late.”

“Do more boy or girl babies come to the wood?”

“They don’t come to the wood; we go to the wood and find them.”

“Are there more boys or girls of you now?”

I had found that to ask precisely the same question twice, made them
knit their brows.

“I do not know,” she answered.

“You can count them, surely!”

“We never do that. We shouldn’t like to be counted.”

“Why?”

“It wouldn’t be smooth. We would rather not know.”

“Where do the babies come from first?”

“From the wood--always. There is no other place they can come from.”

She knew where they came from last, and thought nothing else was to be
known about their advent.

“How often do you find one?”

“Such a happy thing takes all the glad we’ve got, and we forget the last
time. You too are glad to have him--are you not, good giant?”

“Yes, indeed, I am!” I answered. “But how do you feed him?”

“I will show you,” she rejoined, and went away--to return directly with
two or three ripe little plums. She put one to the baby’s lips.

“He would open his mouth if he were awake,” she said, and took him in
her arms.

She squeezed a drop to the surface, and again held the fruit to the
baby’s lips. Without waking he began at once to suck it, and she went on
slowly squeezing until nothing but skin and stone were left.

“There!” she cried, in a tone of gentle triumph. “A big-apple world it
would be with nothing for the babies! We wouldn’t stop in it--would we,
darling? We would leave it to the bad giants!”

“But what if you let the stone into the baby’s mouth when you were
feeding him?” I said.

“No mother would do that,” she replied. “I shouldn’t be fit to have a
baby!”

I thought what a lovely woman she would grow. But what became of them
when they grew up? Where did they go? That brought me again to the
question--where did they come from first?

“Will you tell me where you lived before?” I said.

“Here,” she replied.

“Have you NEVER lived anywhere else?” I ventured.

“Never. We all came from the wood. Some think we dropped out of the
trees.”

“How is it there are so many of you quite little?”

“I don’t understand. Some are less and some are bigger. I am very big.”

“Baby will grow bigger, won’t he?”

“Of course he will!”

“And will you grow bigger?”

“I don’t think so. I hope not. I am the biggest. It frightens me
sometimes.”

“Why should it frighten you?”

She gave me no answer.

“How old are you?” I resumed.

“I do not know what you mean. We are all just that.”

“How big will the baby grow?”

“I cannot tell.--Some,” she added, with a trouble in her voice, “begin
to grow after we think they have stopped.--That is a frightful thing. We
don’t talk about it!”

“What makes it frightful?”

She was silent for a moment, then answered,

“We fear they may be beginning to grow giants.”

“Why should you fear that?”

“Because it is so terrible.--I don’t want to talk about it!”

She pressed the baby to her bosom with such an anxious look that I dared
not further question her.

Before long I began to perceive in two or three of the smaller children
some traces of greed and selfishness, and noted that the bigger girls
cast on these a not infrequent glance of anxiety.

None of them put a hand to my work: they would do nothing for the
giants! But they never relaxed their loving ministrations to me. They
would sing to me, one after another, for hours; climb the tree to reach
my mouth and pop fruit into it with their dainty little fingers; and
they kept constant watch against the approach of a giant.

Sometimes they would sit and tell me stories--mostly very childish, and
often seeming to mean hardly anything. Now and then they would call a
general assembly to amuse me. On one such occasion a moody little
fellow sang me a strange crooning song, with a refrain so pathetic that,
although unintelligible to me, it caused the tears to run down my face.
This phenomenon made those who saw it regard me with much perplexity.
Then first I bethought myself that I had not once, in that world, looked
on water, falling or lying or running. Plenty there had been in some
long vanished age--that was plain enough--but the Little Ones had never
seen any before they saw my tears! They had, nevertheless, it seemed,
some dim, instinctive perception of their origin; for a very small child
went up to the singer, shook his clenched pud in his face, and said
something like this: “‘Ou skeeze ze juice out of ze good giant’s
seeberries! Bad giant!”

“How is it,” I said one day to Lona, as she sat with the baby in her
arms at the foot of my tree, “that I never see any children among the
giants?”

She stared a little, as if looking in vain for some sense in the
question, then replied,

“They are giants; there are no little ones.”

“Have they never any children?” I asked.

“No; there are never any in the wood for them. They do not love them. If
they saw ours, they would stamp them.”

“Is there always the same number of the giants then? I thought, before I
had time to know better, that they were your fathers and mothers.”

She burst into the merriest laughter, and said,

“No, good giant; WE are THEIR firsters.”

But as she said it, the merriment died out of her, and she looked
scared.

I stopped working, and gazed at her, bewildered.

“How CAN that be?” I exclaimed.

“I do not say; I do not understand,” she answered. “But we were here and
they not. They go from us. I am sorry, but we cannot help it. THEY could
have helped it.”

“How long have you been here?” I asked, more and more puzzled--in the
hope of some side-light on the matter.

“Always, I think,” she replied. “I think somebody made us always.”

I turned to my scraping.

She saw I did not understand.

“The giants were not made always,” she resumed. “If a Little One doesn’t
care, he grows greedy, and then lazy, and then big, and then stupid, and
then bad. The dull creatures don’t know that they come from us. Very
few of them believe we are anywhere. They say NONSENSE!--Look at little
Blunty: he is eating one of their apples! He will be the next! Oh! oh!
he will soon be big and bad and ugly, and not know it!”

The child stood by himself a little way off, eating an apple nearly
as big as his head. I had often thought he did not look so good as the
rest; now he looked disgusting.

“I will take the horrid thing from him!” I cried.

“It is no use,” she answered sadly. “We have done all we can, and it
is too late! We were afraid he was growing, for he would not believe
anything told him; but when he refused to share his berries, and said
he had gathered them for himself, then we knew it! He is a glutton, and
there is no hope of him.--It makes me sick to see him eat!”

“Could not some of the boys watch him, and not let him touch the
poisonous things?”

“He may have them if he will: it is all one--to eat the apples, and to
be a boy that would eat them if he could. No; he must go to the giants!
He belongs to them. You can see how much bigger he is than when first
you came! He is bigger since yesterday.”

“He is as like that hideous green lump in his hand as boy could look!”

“It suits what he is making himself.”

“His head and it might change places!”

“Perhaps they do!”

“Does he want to be a giant?”

“He hates the giants, but he is making himself one all the same: he
likes their apples! Oh baby, baby, he was just such a darling as you
when we found him!”

“He will be very miserable when he finds himself a giant!”

“Oh, no; he will like it well enough! That is the worst of it.”

“Will he hate the Little Ones?”

“He will be like the rest; he will not remember us--most likely will
not believe there are Little Ones. He will not care; he will eat his
apples.”

“Do tell me how it will come about. I understand your world so little! I
come from a world where everything is different.”

“I do not know about WORLD. What is it? What more but a word in your
beautiful big mouth?--That makes it something!”

“Never mind about the word; tell me what next will happen to Blunty.”

“He will wake one morning and find himself a giant--not like you, good
giant, but like any other bad giant. You will hardly know him, but I
will tell you which. He will think he has been a giant always, and will
not know you, or any of us. The giants have lost themselves, Peony says,
and that is why they never smile. I wonder whether they are not glad
because they are bad, or bad because they are not glad. But they can’t
be glad when they have no babies! I wonder what BAD means, good giant!”

“I wish I knew no more about it than you!” I returned. “But I try to be
good, and mean to keep on trying.”

“So do I--and that is how I know you are good.”

A long pause followed.

“Then you do not know where the babies come from into the wood?” I said,
making one attempt more.

“There is nothing to know there,” she answered. “They are in the wood;
they grow there.”

“Then how is it you never find one before it is quite grown?” I asked.

She knitted her brows and was silent a moment:

“They’re not there till they’re finished,” she said.

“It is a pity the little sillies can’t speak till they’ve forgotten
everything they had to tell!” I remarked.

“Little Tolma, the last before this baby, looked as if she had something
to tell, when I found her under a beech-tree, sucking her thumb, but she
hadn’t. She only looked up at me--oh, so sweetly! SHE will never go
bad and grow big! When they begin to grow big they care for nothing but
bigness; and when they cannot grow any bigger, they try to grow fatter.
The bad giants are very proud of being fat.”

“So they are in my world,” I said; “only they do not say FAT there, they
say RICH.”

“In one of their houses,” continued Lona, “sits the biggest and fattest
of them--so proud that nobody can see him; and the giants go to his
house at certain times, and call out to him, and tell him how fat he is,
and beg him to make them strong to eat more and grow fat like him.”

The rumour at length reached my ears that Blunty had vanished. I saw a
few grave faces among the bigger ones, but he did not seem to be much
missed.

The next morning Lona came to me and whispered,

“Look! look there--by that quince-tree: that is the giant that was
Blunty!--Would you have known him?”

“Never,” I answered. “--But now you tell me, I could fancy it might be
Blunty staring through a fog! He DOES look stupid!”

“He is for ever eating those apples now!” she said. “That is what comes
of Little Ones that WON’T be little!”

“They call it growing-up in my world!” I said to myself. “If only she
would teach me to grow the other way, and become a Little One!--Shall I
ever be able to laugh like them?”

I had had the chance, and had flung it from me! Blunty and I were alike!
He did not know his loss, and I had to be taught mine!




CHAPTER XIV. A CRISIS

For a time I had no desire save to spend my life with the Little Ones.
But soon other thoughts and feelings began to influence me. First awoke
the vague sense that I ought to be doing something; that I was not
meant for the fattening of boors! Then it came to me that I was in a
marvellous world, of which it was assuredly my business to discover
the ways and laws; and that, if I would do anything in return for the
children’s goodness, I must learn more about them than they could tell
me, and to that end must be free. Surely, I thought, no suppression of
their growth can be essential to their loveliness and truth and purity!
Not in any world could the possibility exist of such a discord between
constitution and its natural outcome! Life and law cannot be so at
variance that perfection must be gained by thwarting development! But
the growth of the Little Ones WAS arrested! something interfered with
it: what was it? Lona seemed the eldest of them, yet not more than
fifteen, and had been long in charge of a multitude, in semblance and
mostly in behaviour merest children, who regarded her as their mother!
Were they growing at all? I doubted it. Of time they had scarcely the
idea; of their own age they knew nothing! Lona herself thought she had
lived always! Full of wisdom and empty of knowledge, she was at once
their Love and their Law! But what seemed to me her ignorance might in
truth be my own lack of insight! Her one anxiety plainly was, that her
Little Ones should not grow, and change into bad giants! Their “good
giant” was bound to do his best for them: without more knowledge of
their nature, and some knowledge of their history, he could do nothing,
and must therefore leave them! They would only be as they were
before; they had in no way become dependent on me; they were still
my protectors, I was not theirs; my presence but brought them more in
danger of their idiotic neighbours! I longed to teach them many things:
I must first understand more of those I would teach! Knowledge no
doubt made bad people worse, but it must make good people better! I was
convinced they would learn mathematics; and might they not be taught to
write down the dainty melodies they murmured and forgot?

The conclusion was, that I must rise and continue my travels, in the
hope of coming upon some elucidation of the fortunes and destiny of the
bewitching little creatures.

My design, however, would not so soon have passed into action, but for
what now occurred.

To prepare them for my temporary absence, I was one day telling them
while at work that I would long ago have left the bad giants, but that I
loved the Little Ones so much--when, as by one accord, they came rushing
and crowding upon me; they scrambled over each other and up the tree and
dropped on my head, until I was nearly smothered. With three very little
ones in my arms, one on each shoulder clinging to my neck, one standing
straight up on my head, four or five holding me fast by the legs, others
grappling my body and arms, and a multitude climbing and descending upon
these, I was helpless as one overwhelmed by lava. Absorbed in the merry
struggle, not one of them saw my tyrant coming until he was almost upon
me. With just one cry of “Take care, good giant!” they ran from me like
mice, they dropped from me like hedgehogs, they flew from me up the tree
like squirrels, and the same moment, sharp round the stem came the bad
giant, and dealt me such a blow on the head with a stick that I fell to
the ground. The children told me afterwards that they sent him “such
a many bumps of big apples and stones” that he was frightened, and ran
blundering home.

When I came to myself it was night. Above me were a few pale stars that
expected the moon. I thought I was alone. My head ached badly, and I was
terribly athirst.

I turned wearily on my side. The moment my ear touched the ground, I
heard the gushing and gurgling of water, and the soft noises made me
groan with longing. At once I was amid a multitude of silent children,
and delicious little fruits began to visit my lips. They came and came
until my thirst was gone.

Then I was aware of sounds I had never heard there before; the air was
full of little sobs.

I tried to sit up. A pile of small bodies instantly heaped itself at my
back. Then I struggled to my feet, with much pushing and pulling from
the Little Ones, who were wonderfully strong for their size.

“You must go away, good giant,” they said. “When the bad giants see you
hurt, they will all trample on you.”

“I think I must,” I answered.

“Go and grow strong, and come again,” they said.

“I will,” I replied--and sat down.

“Indeed you must go at once!” whispered Lona, who had been supporting
me, and now knelt beside me.

“I listened at his door,” said one of the bigger boys, “and heard the
bad giant say to his wife that he had found you idle, talking to a lot
of moles and squirrels, and when he beat you, they tried to kill him. He
said you were a wizard, and they must knock you, or they would have no
peace.”

“I will go at once,” I said, “and come back as soon as I have found out
what is wanted to make you bigger and stronger.”

“We don’t want to be bigger,” they answered, looking very serious.
“We WON’T grow bad giants!--We are strong now; you don’t know how much
strong!”

It was no use holding them out a prospect that had not any attraction
for them! I said nothing more, but rose and moved slowly up the slope of
the valley. At once they formed themselves into a long procession; some
led the way, some walked with me helping me, and the rest followed. They
kept feeding me as we went.

“You are broken,” they said, “and much red juice has run out of you: put
some in.”

When we reached the edge of the valley, there was the moon just lifting
her forehead over the rim of the horizon.

“She has come to take care of you, and show you the way,” said Lona.

I questioned those about me as we walked, and learned there was a great
place with a giant-girl for queen. When I asked if it was a city, they
said they did not know. Neither could they tell how far off, or in what
direction it was, or what was the giant-girl’s name; all they knew was,
that she hated the Little Ones, and would like to kill them, only she
could not find them. I asked how they knew that; Lona answered that she
had always known it. If the giant-girl came to look for them, they must
hide hard, she said. When I told them I should go and ask her why she
hated them, they cried out,

“No, no! she will kill you, good giant; she will kill you! She is an
awful bad-giant witch!”

I asked them where I was to go then. They told me that, beyond the
baby-forest, away where the moon came from, lay a smooth green country,
pleasant to the feet, without rocks or trees. But when I asked how I was
to set out for it.

“The moon will tell you, we think,” they said.

They were taking me up the second branch of the river bed: when they saw
that the moon had reached her height, they stopped to return.

“We have never gone so far from our trees before,” they said. “Now mind
you watch how you go, that you may see inside your eyes how to come back
to us.”

“And beware of the giant-woman that lives in the desert,” said one of
the bigger girls as they were turning, “I suppose you have heard of
her!”

“No,” I answered.

“Then take care not to go near her. She is called the Cat-woman. She is
awfully ugly--AND SCRATCHES.”

As soon as the bigger ones stopped, the smaller had begun to run back.
The others now looked at me gravely for a moment, and then walked slowly
away. Last to leave me, Lona held up the baby to be kissed, gazed in
my eyes, whispered, “The Cat-woman will not hurt YOU,” and went without
another word. I stood a while, gazing after them through the moonlight,
then turned and, with a heavy heart, began my solitary journey. Soon the
laughter of the Little Ones overtook me, like sheep-bells innumerable,
rippling the air, and echoing in the rocks about me. I turned again, and
again gazed after them: they went gamboling along, with never a care in
their sweet souls. But Lona walked apart with her baby.

Pondering as I went, I recalled many traits of my little friends.

Once when I suggested that they should leave the country of the bad
giants, and go with me to find another, they answered, “But that would
be to NOT ourselves!”--so strong in them was the love of place that
their country seemed essential to their very being! Without ambition or
fear, discomfort or greed, they had no motive to desire any change; they
knew of nothing amiss; and, except their babies, they had never had a
chance of helping any one but myself:--How were they to grow? But again,
Why should they grow? In seeking to improve their conditions, might
I not do them harm, and only harm? To enlarge their minds after the
notions of my world--might it not be to distort and weaken them? Their
fear of growth as a possible start for gianthood might be instinctive!

The part of philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who
would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and
must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye.




CHAPTER XV. A STRANGE HOSTESS

I travelled on attended by the moon. As usual she was full--I had never
seen her other--and to-night as she sank I thought I perceived something
like a smile on her countenance.

When her under edge was a little below the horizon, there appeared in
the middle of her disc, as if it had been painted upon it, a cottage,
through the open door and window of which she shone; and with the sight
came the conviction that I was expected there. Almost immediately the
moon was gone, and the cottage had vanished; the night was rapidly
growing dark, and my way being across a close succession of small
ravines, I resolved to remain where I was and expect the morning. I
stretched myself, therefore, in a sandy hollow, made my supper off the
fruits the children had given me at parting, and was soon asleep.

I woke suddenly, saw above me constellations unknown to my former world,
and had lain for a while gazing at them, when I became aware of a figure
seated on the ground a little way from and above me. I was startled, as
one is on discovering all at once that he is not alone. The figure was
between me and the sky, so that I saw its outline well. From where I lay
low in the hollow, it seemed larger than human.

It moved its head, and then first I saw that its back was toward me.

“Will you not come with me?” said a sweet, mellow voice, unmistakably a
woman’s.

Wishing to learn more of my hostess,

“I thank you,” I replied, “but I am not uncomfortable here. Where would
you have me go? I like sleeping in the open air.”

“There is no hurt in the air,” she returned; “but the creatures that
roam the night in these parts are not such as a man would willingly have
about him while he sleeps.”

“I have not been disturbed,” I said.

“No; I have been sitting by you ever since you lay down.”

“That is very kind of you! How came you to know I was here? Why do you
show me such favour?”

“I saw you,” she answered, still with her back to me, “in the light of
the moon, just as she went down. I see badly in the day, but at night
perfectly. The shadow of my house would have hidden you, but both
its doors were open. I was out on the waste, and saw you go into this
hollow. You were asleep, however, before I could reach you, and I was
not willing to disturb you. People are frightened if I come on them
suddenly. They call me the Cat-woman. It is not my name.”

I remembered what the children had told me--that she was very ugly, and
scratched. But her voice was gentle, and its tone a little apologetic:
she could not be a bad giantess!

“You shall not hear it from me,” I answered, “Please tell me what I MAY
call you!”

“When you know me, call me by the name that seems to you to fit me,” she
replied: “that will tell me what sort you are. People do not often give
me the right one. It is well when they do.”

“I suppose, madam, you live in the cottage I saw in the heart of the
moon?”

“I do. I live there alone, except when I have visitors. It is a poor
place, but I do what I can for my guests, and sometimes their sleep is
sweet to them.”

Her voice entered into me, and made me feel strangely still.

“I will go with you, madam,” I said, rising.

She rose at once, and without a glance behind her led the way. I could
see her just well enough to follow. She was taller than myself, but not
so tall as I had thought her. That she never turned her face to me made
me curious--nowise apprehensive, her voice rang so true. But how was I
to fit her with a name who could not see her? I strove to get alongside
of her, but failed: when I quickened my pace she quickened hers, and
kept easily ahead of me. At length I did begin to grow a little afraid.
Why was she so careful not to be seen? Extraordinary ugliness would
account for it: she might fear terrifying me! Horror of an inconceivable
monstrosity began to assail me: was I following through the dark
an unheard of hideousness? Almost I repented of having accepted her
hospitality.

Neither spoke, and the silence grew unbearable. I MUST break it!

“I want to find my way,” I said, “to a place I have heard of, but whose
name I have not yet learned. Perhaps you can tell it me!”

“Describe it, then, and I will direct you. The stupid Bags know nothing,
and the careless little Lovers forget almost everything.”

“Where do those live?”

“You are just come from them!”

“I never heard those names before!”

“You would not hear them. Neither people knows its own name!”

“Strange!”

“Perhaps so! but hardly any one anywhere knows his own name! It would
make many a fine gentleman stare to hear himself addressed by what is
really his name!”

I held my peace, beginning to wonder what my name might be.

“What now do you fancy yours?” she went on, as if aware of my thought.
“But, pardon me, it is a matter of no consequence.”

I had actually opened my mouth to answer her, when I discovered that my
name was gone from me. I could not even recall the first letter of it!
This was the second time I had been asked my name and could not tell it!

“Never mind,” she said; “it is not wanted. Your real name, indeed, is
written on your forehead, but at present it whirls about so irregularly
that nobody can read it. I will do my part to steady it. Soon it will go
slower, and, I hope, settle at last.”

This startled me, and I was silent.

We had left the channels and walked a long time, but no sign of the
cottage yet appeared.

“The Little Ones told me,” I said at length, “of a smooth green country,
pleasant to the feet!”

“Yes?” she returned.

“They told me too of a girl giantess that was queen somewhere: is that
her country?”

“There is a city in that grassy land,” she replied, “where a woman is
princess. The city is called Bulika. But certainly the princess is not
a girl! She is older than this world, and came to it from yours--with
a terrible history, which is not over yet. She is an evil person, and
prevails much with the Prince of the Power of the Air. The people of
Bulika were formerly simple folk, tilling the ground and pasturing
sheep. She came among them, and they received her hospitably. She taught
them to dig for diamonds and opals and sell them to strangers, and made
them give up tillage and pasturage and build a city. One day they found
a huge snake and killed it; which so enraged her that she declared
herself their princess, and became terrible to them. The name of the
country at that time was THE LAND OF WATERS; for the dry channels,
of which you have crossed so many, were then overflowing with live
torrents; and the valley, where now the Bags and the Lovers have their
fruit-trees, was a lake that received a great part of them. But the
wicked princess gathered up in her lap what she could of the water over
the whole country, closed it in an egg, and carried it away. Her lap,
however, would not hold more than half of it; and the instant she was
gone, what she had not yet taken fled away underground, leaving the
country as dry and dusty as her own heart. Were it not for the waters
under it, every living thing would long ago have perished from it. For
where no water is, no rain falls; and where no rain falls, no springs
rise. Ever since then, the princess has lived in Bulika, holding the
inhabitants in constant terror, and doing what she can to keep them from
multiplying. Yet they boast and believe themselves a prosperous, and
certainly are a self-satisfied people--good at bargaining and buying,
good at selling and cheating; holding well together for a common
interest, and utterly treacherous where interests clash; proud of their
princess and her power, and despising every one they get the better of;
never doubting themselves the most honourable of all the nations, and
each man counting himself better than any other. The depth of their
worthlessness and height of their vainglory no one can understand who
has not been there to see, who has not learned to know the miserable
misgoverned and self-deceived creatures.”

“I thank you, madam. And now, if you please, will you tell me something
about the Little Ones--the Lovers? I long heartily to serve them. Who
and what are they? and how do they come to be there? Those children are
the greatest wonder I have found in this world of wonders.”

“In Bulika you may, perhaps, get some light on those matters. There is
an ancient poem in the library of the palace, I am told, which of course
no one there can read, but in which it is plainly written that after the
Lovers have gone through great troubles and learned their own name, they
will fill the land, and make the giants their slaves.”

“By that time they will have grown a little, will they not?” I said.

“Yes, they will have grown; yet I think too they will not have grown.
It is possible to grow and not to grow, to grow less and to grow bigger,
both at once--yes, even to grow by means of not growing!”

“Your words are strange, madam!” I rejoined. “But I have heard it said
that some words, because they mean more, appear to mean less!”

“That is true, and such words HAVE to be understood. It were well for
the princess of Bulika if she heard what the very silence of the land
is shouting in her ears all day long! But she is far too clever to
understand anything.”

“Then I suppose, when the little Lovers are grown, their land will have
water again?”

“Not exactly so: when they are thirsty enough, they will have water,
and when they have water, they will grow. To grow, they must have water.
And, beneath, it is flowing still.”

“I have heard that water twice,” I said; “--once when I lay down to wait
for the moon--and when I woke the sun was shining! and once when I
fell, all but killed by the bad giant. Both times came the voices of the
water, and healed me.”

The woman never turned her head, and kept always a little before me, but
I could hear every word that left her lips, and her voice much reminded
me of the woman’s in the house of death. Much of what she said, I did
not understand, and therefore cannot remember. But I forgot that I had
ever been afraid of her.

We went on and on, and crossed yet a wide tract of sand before reaching
the cottage. Its foundation stood in deep sand, but I could see that
it was a rock. In character the cottage resembled the sexton’s, but had
thicker walls. The door, which was heavy and strong, opened immediately
into a large bare room, which had two little windows opposite each
other, without glass. My hostess walked in at the open door out of which
the moon had looked, and going straight to the farthest corner, took a
long white cloth from the floor, and wound it about her head and face.
Then she closed the other door, in at which the moon had looked, trimmed
a small horn lantern that stood on the hearth, and turned to receive me.

“You are very welcome, Mr. Vane!” she said, calling me by the name I had
forgotten. “Your entertainment will be scanty, but, as the night is not
far spent, and the day not at hand, it is better you should be indoors.
Here you will be safe, and a little lack is not a great misery.”

“I thank you heartily, madam,” I replied. “But, seeing you know the name
I could not tell you, may I not now know yours?”

“My name is Mara,” she answered.

Then I remembered the sexton and the little black cat.

“Some people,” she went on, “take me for Lot’s wife, lamenting over
Sodom; and some think I am Rachel, weeping for her children; but I am
neither of those.”

“I thank you again, Mara,” I said. “--May I lie here on your floor till
the morning?”

“At the top of that stair,” she answered, “you will find a bed--on which
some have slept better than they expected, and some have waked all the
night and slept all the next day. It is not a very soft one, but it is
better than the sand--and there are no hyenas sniffing about it!”

The stair, narrow and steep, led straight up from the room to an
unceiled and unpartitioned garret, with one wide, low dormer window.
Close under the sloping roof stood a narrow bed, the sight of which with
its white coverlet made me shiver, so vividly it recalled the couches in
the chamber of death. On the table was a dry loaf, and beside it a cup
of cold water. To me, who had tasted nothing but fruit for months, they
were a feast.

“I must leave you in the dark,” my hostess called from the bottom of the
stair. “This lantern is all the light I have, and there are things to do
to-night.”

“It is of no consequence, thank you, madam,” I returned. “To eat and
drink, to lie down and sleep, are things that can be done in the dark.”

“Rest in peace,” she said.

I ate up the loaf, drank the water every drop, and laid myself down.
The bed was hard, the covering thin and scanty, and the night cold: I
dreamed that I lay in the chamber of death, between the warrior and the
lady with the healing wound.

I woke in the middle of the night, thinking I heard low noises of wild
animals.

“Creatures of the desert scenting after me, I suppose!” I said to
myself, and, knowing I was safe, would have gone to sleep again. But
that instant a rough purring rose to a howl under my window, and I
sprang from my bed to see what sort of beast uttered it.

Before the door of the cottage, in the full radiance of the moon, a tall
woman stood, clothed in white, with her back toward me. She was stooping
over a large white animal like a panther, patting and stroking it with
one hand, while with the other she pointed to the moon half-way up the
heaven, then drew a perpendicular line to the horizon. Instantly the
creature darted off with amazing swiftness in the direction indicated.
For a moment my eyes followed it, then sought the woman; but she was
gone, and not yet had I seen her face! Again I looked after the animal,
but whether I saw or only fancied a white speck in the distance, I could
not tell.--What did it mean? What was the monster-cat sent off to do? I
shuddered, and went back to my bed. Then I remembered that, when I lay
down in the sandy hollow outside, the moon was setting; yet here
she was, a few hours after, shining in all her glory! “Everything is
uncertain here,” I said to myself, “--even the motions of the heavenly
bodies!”

I learned afterward that there were several moons in the service of this
world, but the laws that ruled their times and different orbits I failed
to discover.

Again I fell asleep, and slept undisturbed.

When I went down in the morning, I found bread and water waiting me, the
loaf so large that I ate only half of it. My hostess sat muffled beside
me while I broke my fast, and except to greet me when I entered, never
opened her mouth until I asked her to instruct me how to arrive at
Bulika. She then told me to go up the bank of the river-bed until it
disappeared; then verge to the right until I came to a forest--in which
I might spend a night, but which I must leave with my face to the rising
moon. Keeping in the same direction, she said, until I reached a running
stream, I must cross that at right angles, and go straight on until I
saw the city on the horizon.

I thanked her, and ventured the remark that, looking out of the window
in the night, I was astonished to see her messenger understand her so
well, and go so straight and so fast in the direction she had indicated.

“If I had but that animal of yours to guide me--” I went on, hoping to
learn something of its mission, but she interrupted me, saying,

“It was to Bulika she went--the shortest way.”

“How wonderfully intelligent she looked!”

“Astarte knows her work well enough to be sent to do it,” she answered.

“Have you many messengers like her?”

“As many as I require.”

“Are they hard to teach?”

“They need no teaching. They are all of a certain breed, but not one of
the breed is like another. Their origin is so natural it would seem to
you incredible.”

“May I not know it?”

“A new one came to me last night--from your head while you slept.”

I laughed.

“All in this world seem to love mystery!” I said to myself. “Some chance
word of mine suggested an idea--and in this form she embodies the small
fact!”

“Then the creature is mine!” I cried.

“Not at all!” she answered. “That only can be ours in whose existence
our will is a factor.”

“Ha! a metaphysician too!” I remarked inside, and was silent.

“May I take what is left of the loaf?” I asked presently.

“You will want no more to-day,” she replied.

“To-morrow I may!” I rejoined.

She rose and went to the door, saying as she went,

“It has nothing to do with to-morrow--but you may take it if you will.”

She opened the door, and stood holding it. I rose, taking up the
bread--but lingered, much desiring to see her face.

“Must I go, then?” I asked.

“No one sleeps in my house two nights together!” she answered.

“I thank you, then, for your hospitality, and bid you farewell!” I said,
and turned to go.

“The time will come when you must house with me many days and many
nights,” she murmured sadly through her muffling.

“Willingly,” I replied.

“Nay, NOT willingly!” she answered.

I said to myself that she was right--I would not willingly be her guest
a second time! but immediately my heart rebuked me, and I had scarce
crossed the threshold when I turned again.

She stood in the middle of the room; her white garments lay like foamy
waves at her feet, and among them the swathings of her face: it was
lovely as a night of stars. Her great gray eyes looked up to heaven;
tears were flowing down her pale cheeks. She reminded me not a little
of the sexton’s wife, although the one looked as if she had not wept for
thousands of years, and the other as if she wept constantly behind the
wrappings of her beautiful head. Yet something in the very eyes that
wept seemed to say, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in
the morning.”

I had bowed my head for a moment, about to kneel and beg her
forgiveness, when, looking up in the act, I found myself outside a
doorless house. I went round and round it, but could find no entrance.

I had stopped under one of the windows, on the point of calling aloud my
repentant confession, when a sudden wailing, howling scream invaded my
ears, and my heart stood still. Something sprang from the window above
my head, and lighted beyond me. I turned, and saw a large gray cat, its
hair on end, shooting toward the river-bed. I fell with my face in the
sand, and seemed to hear within the house the gentle sobbing of one who
suffered but did not repent.




CHAPTER XVI. A GRUESOME DANCE

I rose to resume my journey, and walked many a desert mile. How I longed
for a mountain, or even a tall rock, from whose summit I might see
across the dismal plain or the dried-up channels to some bordering hope!
Yet what could such foresight have availed me? That which is within a
man, not that which lies beyond his vision, is the main factor in what
is about to befall him: the operation upon him is the event. Foreseeing
is not understanding, else surely the prophecy latent in man would come
oftener to the surface!

The sun was half-way to the horizon when I saw before me a rugged rocky
ascent; but ere I reached it my desire to climb was over, and I longed
to lie down. By that time the sun was almost set, and the air had begun
to grow dark. At my feet lay a carpet of softest, greenest moss, couch
for a king: I threw myself upon it, and weariness at once began to ebb,
for, the moment my head was down, the third time I heard below me many
waters, playing broken airs and ethereal harmonies with the stones of
their buried channels. Loveliest chaos of music-stuff the harp aquarian
kept sending up to my ears! What might not a Händel have done with that
ever-recurring gurgle and bell-like drip, to the mingling and mutually
destructive melodies their common refrain!

As I lay listening, my eyes went wandering up and down the rocky slope
abrupt above me, reading on its face the record that down there, ages
ago, rushed a cataract, filling the channels that had led me to its
foot. My heart swelled at the thought of the splendid tumult, where
the waves danced revelling in helpless fall, to mass their music in one
organ-roar below. But soon the hidden brooks lulled me to sleep, and
their lullabies mingled with my dreams.

I woke before the sun, and eagerly climbed to see what lay beyond. Alas,
nothing but a desert of finest sand! Not a trace was left of the river
that had plunged adown the rocks! The powdery drift had filled its
course to the level of the dreary expanse! As I looked back I saw that
the river had divided into two branches as it fell, that whose bank I
had now followed to the foot of the rocky scaur, and that which first I
crossed to the Evil Wood. The wood I descried between the two on the
far horizon. Before me and to the left, the desert stretched beyond my
vision, but far to the right I could see a lift in the sky-line, giving
hope of the forest to which my hostess had directed me.

I sat down, and sought in my pocket the half-loaf I had brought with
me--then first to understand what my hostess had meant concerning it.
Verily the bread was not for the morrow: it had shrunk and hardened to a
stone! I threw it away, and set out again.

About noon I came to a few tamarisk and juniper trees, and then to a few
stunted firs. As I went on, closer thickets and larger firs met me, and
at length I was in just such a forest of pines and other trees as that
in which the Little Ones found their babies, and believed I had returned
upon a farther portion of the same. But what mattered WHERE while
EVERYWHERE was the same as NOWHERE! I had not yet, by doing something in
it, made ANYWHERE into a place! I was not yet alive; I was only dreaming
I lived! I was but a consciousness with an outlook! Truly I had been
nothing else in the world I had left, but now I knew the fact! I said
to myself that if in this forest I should catch the faint gleam of the
mirror, I would turn far aside lest it should entrap me unawares, and
give me back to my old existence: here I might learn to be something by
doing something! I could not endure the thought of going back, with so
many beginnings and not an end achieved. The Little Ones would meet what
fate was appointed them; the awful witch I should never meet; the dead
would ripen and arise without me; I should but wake to know that I had
dreamed, and that all my going was nowhither! I would rather go on and
on than come to such a close!

I went deeper into the wood: I was weary, and would rest in it.

The trees were now large, and stood in regular, almost geometric,
fashion, with roomy spaces between. There was little undergrowth, and
I could see a long way in every direction. The forest was like a great
church, solemn and silent and empty, for I met nothing on two feet or
four that day. Now and then, it is true, some swift thing, and again
some slow thing, would cross the space on which my eye happened that
moment to settle; but it was always at some distance, and only enhanced
the sense of wideness and vacancy. I heard a few birds, and saw plenty
of butterflies, some of marvellously gorgeous colouring and combinations
of colour, some of a pure and dazzling whiteness.

Coming to a spot where the pines stood farther apart and gave room for
flowering shrubs, and hoping it a sign of some dwelling near, I took the
direction where yet more and more roses grew, for I was hungry after the
voice and face of my kind--after any live soul, indeed, human or not,
which I might in some measure understand. What a hell of horror, I
thought, to wander alone, a bare existence never going out of itself,
never widening its life in another life, but, bound with the cords of
its poor peculiarities, lying an eternal prisoner in the dungeon of its
own being! I began to learn that it was impossible to live for oneself
even, save in the presence of others--then, alas, fearfully possible!
evil was only through good! selfishness but a parasite on the tree
of life! In my own world I had the habit of solitary song; here not a
crooning murmur ever parted my lips! There I sang without thinking; here
I thought without singing! there I had never had a bosom-friend; here
the affection of an idiot would be divinely welcome! “If only I had a
dog to love!” I sighed--and regarded with wonder my past self, which
preferred the company of book or pen to that of man or woman; which, if
the author of a tale I was enjoying appeared, would wish him away that I
might return to his story. I had chosen the dead rather than the living,
the thing thought rather than the thing thinking! “Any man,” I said
now, “is more than the greatest of books!” I had not cared for my
live brothers and sisters, and now I was left without even the dead to
comfort me!

The wood thinned yet more, and the pines grew yet larger, sending up
huge stems, like columns eager to support the heavens. More trees of
other kinds appeared; the forest was growing richer! The roses were now
trees, and their flowers of astonishing splendour.

Suddenly I spied what seemed a great house or castle; but its forms were
so strangely indistinct, that I could not be certain it was more than a
chance combination of tree-shapes. As I drew nearer, its lines yet held
together, but neither they nor the body of it grew at all more definite;
and when at length I stood in front of it, I remained as doubtful of its
nature as before. House or castle habitable, it certainly was not; it
might be a ruin overgrown with ivy and roses! Yet of building hid in the
foliage, not the poorest wall-remnant could I discern. Again and again
I seemed to descry what must be building, but it always vanished before
closer inspection. Could it be, I pondered, that the ivy had embraced a
huge edifice and consumed it, and its interlaced branches retained the
shapes of the walls it had assimilated?--I could be sure of nothing
concerning the appearance.

Before me was a rectangular vacancy--the ghost of a doorway without a
door: I stepped through it, and found myself in an open space like a
great hall, its floor covered with grass and flowers, its walls and roof
of ivy and vine, mingled with roses.

There could be no better place in which to pass the night! I gathered
a quantity of withered leaves, laid them in a corner, and threw myself
upon them. A red sunset filled the hall, the night was warm, and my
couch restful; I lay gazing up at the live ceiling, with its tracery
of branches and twigs, its clouds of foliage, and peeping patches of
loftier roof. My eyes went wading about as if tangled in it, until the
sun was down, and the sky beginning to grow dark. Then the red roses
turned black, and soon the yellow and white alone were visible. When
they vanished, the stars came instead, hanging in the leaves like
live topazes, throbbing and sparkling and flashing many colours: I was
canopied with a tree from Aladdin’s cave!

Then I discovered that it was full of nests, whence tiny heads,
nearly indistinguishable, kept popping out with a chirp or two, and
disappearing again. For a while there were rustlings and stirrings and
little prayers; but as the darkness grew, the small heads became still,
and at last every feathered mother had her brood quiet under her wings,
the talk in the little beds was over, and God’s bird-nursery at rest
beneath the waves of sleep. Once more a few flutterings made me look
up: an owl went sailing across. I had only a glimpse of him, but several
times felt the cool wafture of his silent wings. The mother birds did
not move again; they saw that he was looking for mice, not children.

About midnight I came wide awake, roused by a revelry, whose noises
were yet not loud. Neither were they distant; they were close to me, but
attenuate. My eyes were so dazzled, however, that for a while I could
see nothing; at last they came to themselves.

I was lying on my withered leaves in the corner of a splendid hall.
Before me was a crowd of gorgeously dressed men and gracefully robed
women, none of whom seemed to see me. In dance after dance they vaguely
embodied the story of life, its meetings, its passions, its partings. A
student of Shakspere, I had learned something of every dance alluded
to in his plays, and hence partially understood several of those I
now saw--the minuet, the pavin, the hey, the coranto, the lavolta. The
dancers were attired in fashion as ancient as their dances.

A moon had risen while I slept, and was shining through the
countless-windowed roof; but her light was crossed by so many shadows
that at first I could distinguish almost nothing of the faces of
the multitude; I could not fail, however, to perceive that there was
something odd about them: I sat up to see them better.--Heavens! could
I call them faces? They were skull fronts!--hard, gleaming bone, bare
jaws, truncated noses, lipless teeth which could no more take part in
any smile! Of these, some flashed set and white and murderous; others
were clouded with decay, broken and gapped, coloured of the earth in
which they seemed so long to have lain! Fearfuller yet, the eye-sockets
were not empty; in each was a lidless living eye! In those wrecks of
faces, glowed or flashed or sparkled eyes of every colour, shape, and
expression. The beautiful, proud eye, dark and lustrous, condescending
to whatever it rested upon, was the more terrible; the lovely,
languishing eye, the more repulsive; while the dim, sad eyes, less at
variance with their setting, were sad exceedingly, and drew the heart in
spite of the horror out of which they gazed.

I rose and went among the apparitions, eager to understand something
of their being and belongings. Were they souls, or were they and their
rhythmic motions but phantasms of what had been? By look nor by gesture,
not by slightest break in the measure, did they show themselves aware
of me; I was not present to them: how much were they in relation to each
other? Surely they saw their companions as I saw them! Or was each only
dreaming itself and the rest? Did they know each how they appeared to
the others--a death with living eyes? Had they used their faces, not for
communication, not to utter thought and feeling, not to share existence
with their neighbours, but to appear what they wished to appear, and
conceal what they were? and, having made their faces masks, were they
therefore deprived of those masks, and condemned to go without faces
until they repented?

“How long must they flaunt their facelessness in faceless eyes?” I
wondered. “How long will the frightful punition endure? Have they at
length begun to love and be wise? Have they yet yielded to the shame
that has found them?”

I heard not a word, saw not a movement of one naked mouth. Were they
because of lying bereft of speech? With their eyes they spoke as if
longing to be understood: was it truth or was it falsehood that spoke
in their eyes? They seemed to know one another: did they see one skull
beautiful, and another plain? Difference must be there, and they had had
long study of skulls!

My body was to theirs no obstacle: was I a body, and were they but
forms? or was I but a form, and were they bodies? The moment one of the
dancers came close against me, that moment he or she was on the other
side of me, and I could tell, without seeing, which, whether man or
woman, had passed through my house.

On many of the skulls the hair held its place, and however dressed, or
in itself however beautiful, to my eyes looked frightful on the bones
of the forehead and temples. In such case, the outer ear often remained
also, and at its tip, the jewel of the ear as Sidney calls it,
would hang, glimmering, gleaming, or sparkling, pearl or opal or
diamond--under the night of brown or of raven locks, the sunrise
of golden ripples, or the moonshine of pale, interclouded, fluffy
cirri--lichenous all on the ivory-white or damp-yellow naked bone. I
looked down and saw the daintily domed instep; I looked up and saw the
plump shoulders basing the spring of the round full neck--which withered
at half-height to the fluted shaft of a gibbose cranium.

The music became wilder, the dance faster and faster; eyes flared and
flashed, jewels twinkled and glittered, casting colour and fire on the
pallid grins that glode through the hall, weaving a ghastly rhythmic
woof in intricate maze of multitudinous motion, when sudden came a
pause, and every eye turned to the same spot:--in the doorway stood a
woman, perfect in form, in holding, and in hue, regarding the company
as from the pedestal of a goddess, while the dancers stood “like one
forbid,” frozen to a new death by the vision of a life that killed.
“Dead things, I live!” said her scornful glance. Then, at once, like
leaves in which an instant wind awakes, they turned each to another, and
broke afresh into melodious consorted motion, a new expression in
their eyes, late solitary, now filled with the interchange of a common
triumph. “Thou also,” they seemed to say, “wilt soon become weak as
we! thou wilt soon become like unto us!” I turned mine again to the
woman--and saw upon her side a small dark shadow.

She had seen the change in the dead stare; she looked down; she
understood the talking eyes; she pressed both her lovely hands on the
shadow, gave a smothered cry, and fled. The birds moved rustling in
their nests, and a flash of joy lit up the eyes of the dancers, when
suddenly a warm wind, growing in strength as it swept through the place,
blew out every light. But the low moon yet glimmered on the horizon with
“sick assay” to shine, and a turbid radiance yet gleamed from so many
eyes, that I saw well enough what followed. As if each shape had been
but a snow-image, it began to fall to pieces, ruining in the warm wind.
In papery flakes the flesh peeled from its bones, dropping like soiled
snow from under its garments; these fell fluttering in rags and strips,
and the whole white skeleton, emerging from garment and flesh together,
stood bare and lank amid the decay that littered the floor. A faint
rattling shiver went through the naked company; pair after pair
the lamping eyes went out; and the darkness grew round me with the
loneliness. For a moment the leaves were still swept fluttering all one
way; then the wind ceased, and the owl floated silent through the silent
night.

Not for a moment had I been afraid. It is true that whoever would cross
the threshold of any world, must leave fear behind him; but, for myself,
I could claim no part in its absence. No conscious courage was operant
in me; simply, I was not afraid. I neither knew why I was not afraid,
nor wherefore I might have been afraid. I feared not even fear--which of
all dangers is the most dangerous.

I went out into the wood, at once to resume my journey. Another moon was
rising, and I turned my face toward it.




CHAPTER XVII. A GROTESQUE TRAGEDY

I had not gone ten paces when I caught sight of a strange-looking
object, and went nearer to know what it might be. I found it a
mouldering carriage of ancient form, ruinous but still upright on its
heavy wheels. On each side of the pole, still in its place, lay the
skeleton of a horse; from their two grim white heads ascended the
shrivelled reins to the hand of the skeleton-coachman seated on his
tattered hammer-cloth; both doors had fallen away; within sat two
skeletons, each leaning back in its corner.

Even as I looked, they started awake, and with a cracking rattle of
bones, each leaped from the door next it. One fell and lay; the other
stood a moment, its structure shaking perilously; then with difficulty,
for its joints were stiff, crept, holding by the back of the carriage,
to the opposite side, the thin leg-bones seeming hardly strong enough to
carry its weight, where, kneeling by the other, it sought to raise it,
almost falling itself again in the endeavour.

The prostrate one rose at length, as by a sudden effort, to the sitting
posture. For a few moments it turned its yellowish skull to this side
and that; then, heedless of its neighbour, got upon its feet by grasping
the spokes of the hind wheel. Half erected thus, it stood with its back
to the other, both hands holding one of its knee-joints. With little
less difficulty and not a few contortions, the kneeling one rose next,
and addressed its companion.

“Have you hurt yourself, my lord?” it said, in a voice that sounded
far-off, and ill-articulated as if blown aside by some spectral wind.

“Yes, I have,” answered the other, in like but rougher tone. “You would
do nothing to help me, and this cursed knee is out!”

“I did my best, my lord.”

“No doubt, my lady, for it was bad! I thought I should never find my
feet again!--But, bless my soul, madam! are you out in your bones?”

She cast a look at herself.

“I have nothing else to be out in,” she returned; “--and YOU at least
cannot complain! But what on earth does it mean? Am I dreaming?”

“YOU may be dreaming, madam--I cannot tell; but this knee of mine
forbids me the grateful illusion.--Ha! I too, I perceive, have nothing
to walk in but bones!--Not so unbecoming to a man, however! I trust to
goodness they are not MY bones! every one aches worse than another, and
this loose knee worst of all! The bed must have been damp--and I too
drunk to know it!”

“Probably, my lord of Cokayne!”

“What! what!--You make me think I too am dreaming--aches and all! How
do YOU know the title my roistering bullies give me? I don’t remember
you!--Anyhow, you have no right to take liberties! My name is--I am
lord----tut, tut! What do you call me when I’m--I mean when you are
sober? I cannot--at the moment,--Why, what IS my name?--I must have been
VERY drunk when I went to bed! I often am!”

“You come so seldom to mine, that I do not know, my lord; but I may take
your word for THAT!”

“I hope so!”

“--if for nothing else!” “Hoity toity! I never told you a lie in my
life!”

“You never told me anything but lies.”

“Upon my honour!--Why, I never saw the woman before!”

“You knew me well enough to lie to, my lord!”

“I do seem to begin to dream I have met you before, but, upon my oath,
there is nothing to know you by! Out of your clothes, who is to tell
who you may not be?--One thing I MAY swear--that I never saw you so much
undressed before!--By heaven, I have no recollection of you!”

“I am glad to hear it: my recollections of you are the less
distasteful!--Good morning, my lord!”

She turned away, hobbled, clacking, a few paces, and stood again.

“You are just as heartless as--as--any other woman, madam!--Where in
this hell of a place shall I find my valet?--What was the cursed name I
used to call the fool?”

He turned his bare noddle this way and that on its creaking pivot, still
holding his knee with both hands.

“I will be your valet for once, my lord,” said the lady, turning once
more to him. “--What can I do for you? It is not easy to tell!”

“Tie my leg on, of course, you fool! Can’t you see it is all but off?
Heigho, my dancing days!”

She looked about with her eyeless sockets and found a piece of fibrous
grass, with which she proceeded to bind together the adjoining parts
that had formed the knee. When she had done, he gave one or two
carefully tentative stamps.

“You used to stamp rather differently, my lord!” she said, as she rose
from her knees.

“Eh? what!--Now I look at you again, it seems to me I used to hate
you!--Eh?”

“Naturally, my lord! You hated a good many people!--your wife, of
course, among the rest!”

“Ah, I begin, I be-gin---- But--I must have been a long time
somewhere!--I really forget!--There! your damned, miserable bit of grass
is breaking!--We used to get on PRETTY well together--eh?”

“Not that I remember, my lord. The only happy moments I had in your
company were scattered over the first week of our marriage.”

“Was that the way of it? Ha! ha!--Well, it’s over now, thank goodness!”

“I wish I could believe it! Why were we sitting there in that carriage
together? It wakes apprehension!”

“I think we were divorced, my lady!”

“Hardly enough: we are still together!”

“A sad truth, but capable of remedy: the forest seems of some extent!”

“I doubt! I doubt!”

“I am sorry I cannot think of a compliment to pay you--without lying,
that is. To judge by your figure and complexion you have lived hard
since I saw you last! I cannot surely be QUITE so naked as your
ladyship!--I beg your pardon, madam! I trust you will take it I am
but jesting in a dream! It is of no consequence, however; dreaming
or waking, all’s one--all merest appearance! You can’t be certain of
anything, and that’s as good as knowing there is nothing! Life may teach
any fool that!”

“It has taught me the fool I was to love you!”

“You were not the only fool to do that! Women had a trick of falling in
love with me:--I had forgotten that you were one of them!” “I did love
you, my lord--a little--at one time!”

“Ah, there was your mistake, my lady! You should have loved me much,
loved me devotedly, loved me savagely--loved me eternally! Then I should
have tired of you the sooner, and not hated you so much afterward!--But
let bygones be bygones!--WHERE are we? Locality is the question! To be
or not to be, is NOT the question!”

“We are in the other world, I presume!”

“Granted!--but in which or what sort of other world? This can’t be
hell!”

“It must: there’s marriage in it! You and I are damned in each other.”

“Then I’m not like Othello, damned in a fair wife!--Oh, I remember my
Shakspeare, madam!”

She picked up a broken branch that had fallen into a bush, and steadying
herself with it, walked away, tossing her little skull.

“Give that stick to me,” cried her late husband; “I want it more than
you.”

She returned him no answer.

“You mean to make me beg for it?”

“Not at all, my lord. I mean to keep it,” she replied, continuing her
slow departure.

“Give it me at once; I mean to have it! I require it.”

“Unfortunately, I think I require it myself!” returned the lady, walking
a little quicker, with a sharper cracking of her joints and clinking of
her bones.

He started to follow her, but nearly fell: his knee-grass had burst, and
with an oath he stopped, grasping his leg again.

“Come and tie it up properly!” he would have thundered, but he only
piped and whistled!

She turned and looked at him.

“Come and tie it up instantly!” he repeated.

She walked a step or two farther from him.

“I swear I will not touch you!” he cried.

“Swear on, my lord! there is no one here to believe you. But, pray, do
not lose your temper, or you will shake yourself to pieces, and where to
find string enough to tie up all your crazy joints, is more than I can
tell.”

She came back, and knelt once more at his side--first, however, laying
the stick in dispute beyond his reach and within her own.

The instant she had finished retying the joint, he made a grab at her,
thinking, apparently, to seize her by the hair; but his hard fingers
slipped on the smooth poll.

“Disgusting!” he muttered, and laid hold of her upper arm-bone.

“You will break it!” she said, looking up from her knees.

“I will, then!” he answered, and began to strain at it.

“I shall not tie your leg again the next time it comes loose!” she
threatened.

He gave her arm a vicious twist, but happily her bones were in better
condition than his. She stretched her other hand toward the broken
branch.

“That’s right: reach me the stick!” he grinned.

She brought it round with such a swing that one of the bones of the
sounder leg snapped. He fell, choking with curses. The lady laughed.

“Now you will have to wear splints always!” she said; “such dry bones
never mend!”

“You devil!” he cried.

“At your service, my lord! Shall I fetch you a couple of wheel-spokes?
Neat--but heavy, I fear!”

He turned his bone-face aside, and did not answer, but lay and groaned.
I marvelled he had not gone to pieces when he fell. The lady rose and
walked away--not all ungracefully, I thought.

“What can come of it?” I said to myself. “These are too wretched for any
world, and this cannot be hell, for the Little Ones are in it, and
the sleepers too! What can it all mean? Can things ever come right for
skeletons?”

“There are words too big for you and me: ALL is one of them, and EVER is
another,” said a voice near me which I knew.

I looked about, but could not see the speaker.

“You are not in hell,” it resumed. “Neither am I in hell. But those
skeletons are in hell!”

Ere he ended I caught sight of the raven on the bough of a beech, right
over my head. The same moment he left it, and alighting on the ground,
stood there, the thin old man of the library, with long nose and long
coat.

“The male was never a gentleman,” he went on, “and in the bony stage
of retrogression, with his skeleton through his skin, and his character
outside his manners, does not look like one. The female is less vulgar,
and has a little heart. But, the restraints of society removed, you see
them now just as they are and always were!”

“Tell me, Mr. Raven, what will become of them,” I said.

“We shall see,” he replied. “In their day they were the handsomest
couple at court; and now, even in their dry bones, they seem to regard
their former repute as an inalienable possession; to see their faces,
however, may yet do something for them! They felt themselves rich too
while they had pockets, but they have already begun to feel rather
pinched! My lord used to regard my lady as a worthless encumbrance, for
he was tired of her beauty and had spent her money; now he needs her
to cobble his joints for him! These changes have roots of hope in them.
Besides, they cannot now get far away from each other, and they see none
else of their own kind: they must at last grow weary of their mutual
repugnance, and begin to love one another! for love, not hate, is
deepest in what Love ‘loved into being.’”

“I saw many more of their kind an hour ago, in the hall close by!” I
said.

“Of their kind, but not of their sort,” he answered. “For many years
these will see none such as you saw last night. Those are centuries
in advance of these. You saw that those could even dress themselves a
little! It is true they cannot yet retain their clothes so long as they
would--only, at present, for a part of the night; but they are pretty
steadily growing more capable, and will by and by develop faces; for
every grain of truthfulness adds a fibre to the show of their humanity.
Nothing but truth can appear; and whatever is must seem.”

“Are they upheld by this hope?” I asked.

“They are upheld by hope, but they do not in the least know their hope;
to understand it, is yet immeasurably beyond them,” answered Mr. Raven.

His unexpected appearance had caused me no astonishment. I was like a
child, constantly wondering, and surprised at nothing.

“Did you come to find me, sir?” I asked.

“Not at all,” he replied. “I have no anxiety about you. Such as you
always come back to us.”

“Tell me, please, who am I such as?” I said.

“I cannot make my friend the subject of conversation,” he answered, with
a smile.

“But when that friend is present!” I urged.

“I decline the more strongly,” he rejoined.

“But when that friend asks you!” I persisted.

“Then most positively I refuse,” he returned.

“Why?”

“Because he and I would be talking of two persons as if they were one
and the same. Your consciousness of yourself and my knowledge of you are
far apart!”

The lapels of his coat flew out, and the lappets lifted, and I thought
the metamorphosis of HOMO to CORVUS was about to take place before my
eyes. But the coat closed again in front of him, and he added, with
seeming inconsequence,

“In this world never trust a person who has once deceived you. Above
all, never do anything such a one may ask you to do.”

“I will try to remember,” I answered; “--but I may forget!”

“Then some evil that is good for you will follow.”

“And if I remember?”

“Some evil that is not good for you, will not follow.”

The old man seemed to sink to the ground, and immediately I saw the
raven several yards from me, flying low and fast.




CHAPTER XVIII. DEAD OR ALIVE?

I went walking on, still facing the moon, who, not yet high, was staring
straight into the forest. I did not know what ailed her, but she
was dark and dented, like a battered disc of old copper, and looked
dispirited and weary. Not a cloud was nigh to keep her company, and the
stars were too bright for her. “Is this going to last for ever?” she
seemed to say. She was going one way and I was going the other, yet
through the wood we went a long way together. We did not commune much,
for my eyes were on the ground; but her disconsolate look was fixed on
me: I felt without seeing it. A long time we were together, I and the
moon, walking side by side, she the dull shine, and I the live shadow.

Something on the ground, under a spreading tree, caught my eye with its
whiteness, and I turned toward it. Vague as it was in the shadow of
the foliage, it suggested, as I drew nearer, a human body. “Another
skeleton!” I said to myself, kneeling and laying my hand upon it. A body
it was, however, and no skeleton, though as nearly one as body could
well be. It lay on its side, and was very cold--not cold like a stone,
but cold like that which was once alive, and is alive no more. The
closer I looked at it, the oftener I touched it, the less it seemed
possible it should be other than dead. For one bewildered moment, I
fancied it one of the wild dancers, a ghostly Cinderella, perhaps,
that had lost her way home, and perished in the strange night of an
out-of-door world! It was quite naked, and so worn that, even in the
shadow, I could, peering close, have counted without touching them,
every rib in its side. All its bones, indeed, were as visible as if
tight-covered with only a thin elastic leather. Its beautiful yet
terrible teeth, unseemly disclosed by the retracted lips, gleamed
ghastly through the dark. Its hair was longer than itself, thick and
very fine to the touch, and black as night.

It was the body of a tall, probably graceful woman.--How had she come
there? Not of herself, and already in such wasted condition, surely! Her
strength must have failed her; she had fallen, and lain there until she
died of hunger! But how, even so, could she be thus emaciated? And how
came she to be naked? Where were the savages to strip and leave her?
or what wild beasts would have taken her garments? That her body should
have been left was not wonderful!

I rose to my feet, stood, and considered. I must not, could not let her
lie exposed and forsaken! Natural reverence forbade it. Even the
garment of a woman claims respect; her body it were impossible to leave
uncovered! Irreverent eyes might look on it! Brutal claws might toss
it about! Years would pass ere the friendly rains washed it into the
soil!--But the ground was hard, almost solid with interlacing roots, and
I had but my bare hands!

At first it seemed plain that she had not long been dead: there was not
a sign of decay about her! But then what had the slow wasting of life
left of her to decay?

Could she be still alive? Might she not? What if she were! Things went
very strangely in this strange world! Even then there would be little
chance of bringing her back, but I must know she was dead before I
buried her!

As I left the forest-hall, I had spied in the doorway a bunch of ripe
grapes, and brought it with me, eating as I came: a few were yet left on
the stalk, and their juice might possibly revive her! Anyhow it was all
I had with which to attempt her rescue! The mouth was happily a little
open; but the head was in such an awkward position that, to move the
body, I passed my arm under the shoulder on which it lay, when I found
the pine-needles beneath it warm: she could not have been any time dead,
and MIGHT still be alive, though I could discern no motion of the heart,
or any indication that she breathed! One of her hands was clenched hard,
apparently inclosing something small. I squeezed a grape into her mouth,
but no swallowing followed.

To do for her all I could, I spread a thick layer of pine-needles and
dry leaves, laid one of my garments over it, warm from my body, lifted
her upon it, and covered her with my clothes and a great heap of leaves:
I would save the little warmth left in her, hoping an increase to it
when the sun came back. Then I tried another grape, but could perceive
no slightest movement of mouth or throat.

“Doubt,” I said to myself, “may be a poor encouragement to do anything,
but it is a bad reason for doing nothing.” So tight was the skin upon
her bones that I dared not use friction.

I crept into the heap of leaves, got as close to her as I could, and
took her in my arms. I had not much heat left in me, but what I had
I would share with her! Thus I spent what remained of the night,
sleepless, and longing for the sun. Her cold seemed to radiate into me,
but no heat to pass from me to her.

Had I fled from the beautiful sleepers, I thought, each on her “dim,
straight” silver couch, to lie alone with such a bedfellow! I had
refused a lovely privilege: I was given over to an awful duty! Beneath
the sad, slow-setting moon, I lay with the dead, and watched for the
dawn.

The darkness had given way, and the eastern horizon was growing dimly
clearer, when I caught sight of a motion rather than of anything
that moved--not far from me, and close to the ground. It was the low
undulating of a large snake, which passed me in an unswerving line.
Presently appeared, making as it seemed for the same point, what I took
for a roebuck-doe and her calf. Again a while, and two creatures like
bear-cubs came, with three or four smaller ones behind them. The light
was now growing so rapidly that when, a few minutes after, a troop of
horses went trotting past, I could see that, although the largest of
them were no bigger than the smallest Shetland pony, they must yet be
full-grown, so perfect were they in form, and so much had they all the
ways and action of great horses. They were of many breeds. Some seemed
models of cart-horses, others of chargers, hunters, racers. Dwarf cattle
and small elephants followed.

“Why are the children not here!” I said to myself. “The moment I am free
of this poor woman, I must go back and fetch them!”

Where were the creatures going? What drew them? Was this an exodus, or
a morning habit? I must wait for the sun! Till he came I must not leave
the woman! I laid my hand on the body, and could not help thinking it
felt a trifle warmer. It might have gained a little of the heat I had
lost! it could hardly have generated any! What reason for hope there was
had not grown less!

The forehead of the day began to glow, and soon the sun came peering up,
as if to see for the first time what all this stir of a new world was
about. At sight of his great innocent splendour, I rose full of life,
strong against death. Removing the handkerchief I had put to protect the
mouth and eyes from the pine-needles, I looked anxiously to see whether
I had found a priceless jewel, or but its empty case.

The body lay motionless as when I found it. Then first, in the morning
light, I saw how drawn and hollow was the face, how sharp were the bones
under the skin, how every tooth shaped itself through the lips. The
human garment was indeed worn to its threads, but the bird of heaven
might yet be nestling within, might yet awake to motion and song!

But the sun was shining on her face! I re-arranged the handkerchief,
laid a few leaves lightly over it, and set out to follow the creatures.
Their main track was well beaten, and must have long been used--likewise
many of the tracks that, joining it from both sides, merged in, and
broadened it. The trees retreated as I went, and the grass grew thicker.
Presently the forest was gone, and a wide expanse of loveliest green
stretched away to the horizon. Through it, along the edge of the forest,
flowed a small river, and to this the track led. At sight of the water a
new though undefined hope sprang up in me. The stream looked everywhere
deep, and was full to the brim, but nowhere more than a few yards wide.
A bluish mist rose from it, vanishing as it rose. On the opposite side,
in the plentiful grass, many small animals were feeding. Apparently they
slept in the forest, and in the morning sought the plain, swimming the
river to reach it. I knelt and would have drunk, but the water was hot,
and had a strange metallic taste.

I leapt to my feet: here was the warmth I sought--the first necessity of
life! I sped back to my helpless charge.

Without well considering my solitude, no one will understand what seemed
to lie for me in the redemption of this woman from death. “Prove what
she may,” I thought with myself, “I shall at least be lonely no more!” I
had found myself such poor company that now first I seemed to know what
hope was. This blessed water would expel the cold death, and drown my
desolation!

I bore her to the stream. Tall as she was, I found her marvellously
light, her bones were so delicate, and so little covered them. I grew
yet more hopeful when I found her so far from stiff that I could carry
her on one arm, like a sleeping child, leaning against my shoulder. I
went softly, dreading even the wind of my motion, and glad there was no
other.

The water was too hot to lay her at once in it: the shock might scare
from her the yet fluttering life! I laid her on the bank, and dipping
one of my garments, began to bathe the pitiful form. So wasted was it
that, save from the plentifulness and blackness of the hair, it was
impossible even to conjecture whether she was young or old. Her eyelids
were just not shut, which made her look dead the more: there was a crack
in the clouds of her night, at which no sun shone through!

The longer I went on bathing the poor bones, the less grew my hope that
they would ever again be clothed with strength, that ever those eyelids
would lift, and a soul look out; still I kept bathing continuously,
allowing no part time to grow cold while I bathed another; and gradually
the body became so much warmer, that at last I ventured to submerge it:
I got into the stream and drew it in, holding the face above the water,
and letting the swift, steady current flow all about the rest. I noted,
but was able to conclude nothing from the fact, that, for all the heat,
the shut hand never relaxed its hold.

After about ten minutes, I lifted it out and laid it again on the bank,
dried it, and covered it as well as I could, then ran to the forest for
leaves.

The grass and soil were dry and warm; and when I returned I thought it
had scarcely lost any of the heat the water had given it. I spread the
leaves upon it, and ran for more--then for a third and a fourth freight.

I could now leave it and go to explore, in the hope of discovering
some shelter. I ran up the stream toward some rocky hills I saw in that
direction, which were not far off.

When I reached them, I found the river issuing full grown from a rock
at the bottom of one of them. To my fancy it seemed to have run down a
stair inside, an eager cataract, at every landing wild to get out, but
only at the foot finding a door of escape.

It did not fill the opening whence it rushed, and I crept through into a
little cave, where I learned that, instead of hurrying tumultuously down
a stair, it rose quietly from the ground at the back like the base of
a large column, and ran along one side, nearly filling a deep, rather
narrow channel. I considered the place, and saw that, if I could find
a few fallen boughs long enough to lie across the channel, and large
enough to bear a little weight without bending much, I might, with
smaller branches and plenty of leaves, make upon them a comfortable
couch, which the stream under would keep constantly warm. Then I ran
back to see how my charge fared.

She was lying as I had left her. The heat had not brought her to life,
but neither had it developed anything to check farther hope. I got a few
boulders out of the channel, and arranged them at her feet and on both
sides of her.

Running again to the wood, I had not to search long ere I found some
small boughs fit for my purpose--mostly of beech, their dry yellow
leaves yet clinging to them. With these I had soon laid the floor of a
bridge-bed over the torrent. I crossed the boughs with smaller branches,
interlaced these with twigs, and buried all deep in leaves and dry moss.

When thus at length, after not a few journeys to the forest, I had
completed a warm, dry, soft couch, I took the body once more, and set
out with it for the cave. It was so light that now and then as I went
I almost feared lest, when I laid it down, I should find it a skeleton
after all; and when at last I did lay it gently on the pathless bridge,
it was a greater relief to part with that fancy than with the weight.
Once more I covered the body with a thick layer of leaves; and trying
again to feed her with a grape, found to my joy that I could open the
mouth a little farther. The grape, indeed, lay in it unheeded, but I
hoped some of the juice might find its way down.

After an hour or two on the couch, she was no longer cold. The warmth of
the brook had interpenetrated her frame--truly it was but a frame!--and
she was warm to the touch;--not, probably, with the warmth of life, but
with a warmth which rendered it more possible, if she were alive, that
she might live. I had read of one in a trance lying motionless for
weeks!

In that cave, day after day, night after night, seven long days and
nights, I sat or lay, now waking now sleeping, but always watching.
Every morning I went out and bathed in the hot stream, and every morning
felt thereupon as if I had eaten and drunk--which experience gave me
courage to lay her in it also every day.  Once as I did so, a shadow of
discoloration on her left side gave me a terrible shock, but the next
morning it had vanished, and I continued the treatment--every morning,
after her bath, putting a fresh grape in her mouth.

I too ate of the grapes and other berries I found in the forest; but I
believed that, with my daily bath in that river, I could have done very
well without eating at all.

Every time I slept, I dreamed of finding a wounded angel, who, unable to
fly, remained with me until at last she love

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/1640