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Day and Night Stories

by Algernon Blackwood · English · Gutenberg #45964 · 436,357 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Day and Night Stories

Author: Algernon Blackwood


        
Release date: June 14, 2014 [eBook #45964]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAY AND NIGHT STORIES ***

DAY AND NIGHT STORIES

  BY
  ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

  Author _of_ "Ten Minute Stories," "Julius Le Vallon,"
  "The Wave," etc.

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  E. P. DUTTON & CO.
  681 FIFTH AVENUE




  COPYRIGHT, 1917,
  BY E. P. DUTTON & CO.

  Printed in the United States of America




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                              PAGE

       I. THE TRYST                       1

      II. THE TOUCH OF PAN               16

     III. THE WINGS OF HORUS             41

      IV. INITIATION                     66

       V. A DESERT EPISODE               94

      VI. THE OTHER WING                112

     VII. THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM      134

    VIII. CAIN'S ATONEMENT              145

      IX. AN EGYPTIAN HORNET            154

       X. BY WATER                      162

      XI. H. S. H.                      171

     XII. A BIT OF WOOD                 187

    XIII. A VICTIM OF HIGHER SPACE      192

     XIV. TRANSITION                    216

      XV. THE TRADITION                 223




DAY AND NIGHT STORIES

I

THE TRYST

"_Je suis la première au rendez-vous. Je vous attends._"


As he got out of the train at the little wayside station he remembered
the conversation as if it had been yesterday, instead of fifteen years
ago--and his heart went thumping against his ribs so violently that he
almost heard it. The original thrill came over him again with all its
infinite yearning. He felt it as he had felt it _then_--not with that
tragic lessening the interval had brought to each repetition of its
memory. Here, in the familiar scenery of its birth, he realised with
mingled pain and wonder that the subsequent years had not destroyed,
but only dimmed it. The forgotten rapture flamed back with all the
fierce beauty of its genesis, desire at white heat. And the shock of
the abrupt discovery shattered time. Fifteen years became a negligible
moment; the crowded experiences that had intervened seemed but a dream.
The farewell scene, the conversation on the steamer's deck, were
clear as of the day before. He saw the hand holding her big hat that
fluttered in the wind, saw the flowers on the dress where the long coat
was blown open a moment, recalled the face of a hurrying steward who
had jostled them; he even heard the voices--his own and hers:

"Yes," she said simply; "I promise you. You have my word. I'll wait----"

"Till I come back to find you," he interrupted.

Steadfastly she repeated his actual words, then added: "Here; at
home--that is."

"I'll come to the garden gate as usual," he told her, trying to smile.
"I'll knock. You'll open the gate--as usual--and come out to me."

These words, too, she attempted to repeat, but her voice failed, her
eyes filled suddenly with tears; she looked into his face and nodded.
It was just then that her little hand went up to hold the hat on--he
saw the very gesture still. He remembered that he was vehemently
tempted to tear his ticket up there and then, to go ashore with her,
to stay in England, to brave all opposition--when the siren roared its
third horrible warning ... and the ship put out to sea.

       *       *       *       *       *

Fifteen years, thick with various incident, had passed between them
since that moment. His life had risen, fallen, crashed, then risen
again. He had come back at last, fortune won by a lucky coup--at
thirty-five; had come back to find her, come back, above all, to keep
his word. Once every three months they had exchanged the brief letter
agreed upon: "I am well; I am waiting; I am happy; I am unmarried.
Yours----." For his youthful wisdom had insisted that no "man" had the
right to keep "any woman" too long waiting; and she, thinking that
letter brave and splendid, had insisted likewise that he was free--if
freedom called him. They had laughed over this last phrase in their
agreement. They put five years as the possible limit of separation.
By then he would have won success, and obstinate parents would have
nothing more to say.

But when the five years ended he was "on his uppers" in a western
mining town, and with the end of ten in sight those uppers, though
changed, were little better, apparently, than patched and mended. And
it was just then, too, that the change which had been stealing over
him betrayed itself. He realised it abruptly, a sense of shame and
horror in him. The discovery was made unconsciously--it disclosed
itself. He was reading her letter as a labourer on a Californian fruit
farm: "Funny she doesn't marry--some one else!" he heard himself say.
The words were out before he knew it, and certainly before he could
suppress them. They just slipped out, startling him into the truth;
and he knew instantly that the thought was fathered in him by a hidden
wish.... He was older. He had lived. It was a memory he loved.

Despising himself in a contradictory fashion--both vaguely and
fiercely--he yet held true to his boyhood's promise. He did not
write and offer to release her, as he knew they did in stories. He
persuaded himself that he meant to keep his word. There was this fine,
stupid, selfish obstinacy in his character. In any case, she would
misunderstand and think he wanted to set free--himself. "Besides--I'm
still--awfully fond of her," he asserted. And it was true; only the
love, it seemed, had gone its way. Not that another woman took it; he
kept himself clean, held firm as steel. The love, apparently, just
faded of its own accord; her image dimmed, her letters ceased to
thrill, then ceased to interest him.

Subsequent reflection made him realise other details about himself.
In the interval he had suffered hardships, had learned the uncertainty
of life that depends for its continuance on a little food, but that
food often hard to come by, and had seen so many others go under that
he held it more cheaply than of old. The wandering instinct, too, had
caught him, slowly killing the domestic impulse; he lost his desire for
a settled place of abode, the desire for children of his own, lost the
desire to marry at all. Also--he reminded himself with a smile--he had
lost other things: the expression of youth _she_ was accustomed to and
held always in her thoughts of him, two fingers of one hand, his hair!
He wore glasses, too. The gentlemen-adventurers of life get scarred
in those wild places where he lived. He saw himself a rather battered
specimen well on the way to middle age.

There was confusion in his mind, however, _and_ in his heart: a
struggling complex of emotions that made it difficult to know exactly
what he did feel. The dominant clue concealed itself. Feelings shifted.
A single, clear determinant did not offer. He was an honest fellow.
"I can't quite make it out," he said. "What is it I really feel? And
why?" His motive seemed confused. To keep the flame alight for ten long
buffeting years was no small achievement; better men had succumbed in
half the time. Yet something in him still held fast to the girl as with
a band of steel that _would_ not let her go entirely. Occasionally
there came strong reversions, when he ached with longing, yearning,
hope; when he loved her again; remembered passionately each detail of
the far-off courtship days in the forbidden rectory garden beyond the
small, white garden gate. Or was it merely the image and the memory he
loved "again"? He hardly knew himself. He could not tell. That "again"
puzzled him. It was the wrong word surely.... He still wrote the
promised letter, however; it was so easy; those short sentences could
not betray the dead or dying fires. One day, besides, he would return
and claim her. He meant to keep his word.

And he had kept it. Here he was, this calm September afternoon, within
three miles of the village where he first had kissed her, where the
marvel of first love had come to both; three short miles between him
and the little white garden gate of which at this very moment she was
intently thinking, and behind which some fifty minutes later she would
be standing, waiting for him....

He had purposely left the train at an earlier station; he would walk
over in the dusk, climb the familiar steps, knock at the white gate
in the wall as of old, utter the promised words, "I have come back to
find you," enter, and--keep his word. He had written from Mexico a week
before he sailed; he had made careful, even accurate calculations: "In
the dusk, on the sixteenth of September, I shall come and knock," he
added to the usual sentences. The knowledge of his coming, therefore,
had been in her possession seven days. Just before sailing, moreover,
he had heard from her--though not in answer, naturally. She was well;
she was happy; she was unmarried; she was waiting.

And now, as by some magical process of restoration--possible to deep
hearts only, perhaps, though even by them quite inexplicable--the state
of first love had blazed up again in him. In all its radiant beauty it
lit his heart, burned unextinguished in his soul, set body and mind
on fire. The years had merely veiled it. It burst upon him, captured,
overwhelmed him with the suddenness of a dream. He stepped from the
train. He met it in the face. It took him prisoner. The familiar trees
and hedges, the unchanged countryside, the "field-smells known in
infancy," all these, with something subtly added to them, rolled back
the passion of his youth upon him in a flood. No longer was he bound
upon what he deemed, perhaps, an act of honourable duty; it was love
that drove him, as it drove him fifteen years before. And it drove
him with the accumulated passion of desire long forcibly repressed;
almost as if, out of some fancied notion of fairness to the girl, he
had deliberately, yet still unconsciously, said "No" to it; that _she_
had not faded, but that he had decided, "_I_ must forget her." That
sentence: "Why doesn't she marry--some one else?" had not betrayed
change in himself. It surprised another motive: "It's not fair to--her!"

His mind worked with a curious rapidity, but worked within one circle
only. The stress of sudden emotion was extraordinary. He remembered a
thousand things--yet, chief among them, those occasional reversions
when he had felt he "loved her again." Had he not, after all, deceived
himself? Had she ever really "faded" at all? Had he not felt he ought
to let her fade--release her that way? And the change in himself?--that
sentence on the Californian fruit-farm--what did they mean? Which had
been true, the fading or the love?

The confusion in his mind was hopeless, but, as a matter of fact,
he did not think at all: he only _felt_. The momentum, besides, was
irresistible, and before the shattering onset of the sweet revival he
did not stop to analyse the strange result. He knew certain things, and
cared to know no others: that his heart was leaping, his blood running
with the heat of twenty, that joy recaptured him, that he must see,
hear, touch her, hold her in his arms--and marry her. For the fifteen
years had crumbled to a little thing, and at thirty-five he felt
himself but twenty, rapturously, deliciously in love.

He went quickly, eagerly down the little street to the inn, still
feeling only, not thinking anything. The vehement uprush of the old
emotion made reflection of any kind impossible. He gave no further
thought to those long years "out there," when her name, her letters,
the very image of her in his mind, had found him, if not cold, at
least without keen response. All that was forgotten as though it had
not been. The steadfast thing in him, this strong holding to a promise
which had never wilted, ousted the recollection of fading and decay
that, whatever caused them, certainly _had_ existed. And this steadfast
thing now took command. This enduring quality in his character led
him. It was only towards the end of the hurried tea he first received
the singular impression--vague, indeed, but undeniably persistent--the
strange impression that he was _being_ led.

Yet, though aware of this, he did not pause to argue or reflect.
The emotional displacement in him, of course, had been more than
considerable: there had been upheaval, a change whose abruptness was
even dislocating, fundamental in a sense he could not estimate--shock.
Yet he took no count of anything but the one mastering desire to get to
her as soon as possible, knock at the small, white garden gate, hear
her answering voice, see the low wooden door swing open--take her.
There was joy and glory in his heart, and a yearning sweet delight. At
this very moment she was expecting him. And he--had come.

Behind these positive emotions, however, there lay concealed all
the time others that were of a negative character. Consciously, he
was not aware of them, but they were there; they revealed their
presence in various little ways that puzzled him. He recognised them
absentmindedly, as it were; did not analyse or investigate them.
For, through the confusion upon his faculties, rose also a certain
hint of insecurity that betrayed itself by a slight hesitancy or
miscalculation in one or two unimportant actions. There was a touch
of melancholy, too, a sense of something lost. It lay, perhaps, in
that tinge of sadness which accompanies the twilight of an autumn day,
when a gentler, mournful beauty veils a greater beauty that is past.
Some trick of memory connected it with a scene of early boyhood, when,
meaning to see the sunrise, he overslept, and, by a brief half-hour,
was just--too late. He noted it merely, then passed on; he did not
understand it; he hurried all the more, this hurry the only sign that
it _was_ noted. "I must be quick," flashed up across his strongly
positive emotions.

And, due to this hurry, possibly, were the slight miscalculations
that he made. They were very trivial. He rang for sugar, though the
bowl stood just before his eyes, yet when the girl came in he forgot
completely what he rang for--and inquired instead about the evening
trains to London. And, when the time-table was laid before him, he
examined it without intelligence, then looked up suddenly into the
maid's face with a question about flowers. Were there flowers to be had
in the village anywhere? What kind of flowers? "Oh, a bouquet or a"--he
hesitated, searching for a word that tried to present itself, yet was
not the word _he_ wanted to make use of--"or a wreath--of some sort?"
he finished. He took the very word he did not want to take. In several
things he did and said, this hesitancy and miscalculation betrayed
themselves--such trivial things, yet significant in an elusive way that
he disliked. There was sadness, insecurity somewhere in them. And he
resented them, aware of their existence only because they qualified
his joy. There was a whispered "No" floating somewhere in the dusk.
Almost--he felt disquiet. He hurried, more and more eager to be off
upon his journey--the final part of it.

Moreover, there were other signs of an odd miscalculation--dislocation,
perhaps, properly speaking--in him. Though the inn was familiar from
his boyhood days, kept by the same old couple, too, he volunteered
no information about himself, nor asked a single question about the
village he was bound for. He did not even inquire if the rector--her
father--still were living. And when he left he entirely neglected the
gilt-framed mirror above the mantelpiece of plush, dusty pampas-grass
in waterless vases on either side. It did not matter, apparently,
whether he looked well or ill, tidy or untidy. He forgot that when
his cap was off the absence of thick, accustomed hair must alter him
considerably, forgot also that two fingers were missing from one hand,
the right hand, the hand that she would presently clasp. Nor did it
occur to him that he wore glasses, which must change his expression
and add to the appearance of the years he bore. None of these obvious
and natural things seemed to come into his thoughts at all. He was
in a hurry to be off. He did not think. But, though his mind may not
have noted these slight betrayals with actual sentences, his attitude,
nevertheless, expressed them. This was, it seemed, the _feeling_ in
him: "What could such details matter to her _now_? Why, indeed, should
he give to them a single thought? It was himself she loved and waited
for, not separate items of his external, physical image." As well think
of the fact that she, too, must have altered--outwardly. It never once
occurred to him. Such details were of To-day.... He was only impatient
to come to her quickly, very quickly, instantly, if possible. He
hurried.

There was a flood of boyhood's joy in him. He paid for his tea, giving
a tip that was twice the price of the meal, and set out gaily and
impetuously along the winding lane. Charged to the brim with a sweet
picture of a small, white garden gate, the loved face close behind it,
he went forward at a headlong pace, singing "Nancy Lee" as he used to
sing it fifteen years before.

With action, then, the negative sensations hid themselves, obliterated
by the positive ones that took command. The former, however, merely lay
concealed; they waited. Thus, perhaps, does vital emotion, overlong
restrained, denied, indeed, of its blossoming altogether, take revenge.
Repressed elements in his psychic life asserted themselves, selecting,
as though naturally, a dramatic form.

The dusk fell rapidly, mist rose in floating strips along the meadows
by the stream; the old, familiar details beckoned him forwards, then
drove him from behind as he went swiftly past them. He recognised
others rising through the thickening air beyond; they nodded, peered,
and whispered; sometimes they almost sang. And each added to his inner
happiness; each brought its sweet and precious contribution, and built
it into the reconstructed picture of the earlier, long-forgotten
rapture. It was an enticing and enchanted journey that he made,
something impossibly blissful in it, something, too, that seemed
curiously--inevitable.

For the scenery had not altered all these years, the details of the
country were unchanged, everything he saw was rich with dear and
precious association, increasing the momentum of the tide that carried
him along. Yonder was the stile over whose broken step he had helped
her yesterday, and there the slippery plank across the stream where
she looked above her shoulder to ask for his support; he saw the
very bramble bushes where she scratched her hand, a-blackberrying,
the day before ... and, finally, the weather-stained signpost, "To
the Rectory." It pointed to the path through the dangerous field
where Farmer Sparrow's bull provided such a sweet excuse for holding,
leading--protecting her. From the entire landscape rose a steam of
recent memory, each incident alive, each little detail brimmed with its
cargo of fond association.

He read the rough black lettering on the crooked arm--it was rather
faded, but he knew it too well to miss a single letter--and hurried
forward along the muddy track; he looked about him for a sign of Farmer
Sparrow's bull; he even felt in the misty air for the little hand that
he might take and lead her into safety. The thought of her drew him on
with such irresistible anticipation that it seemed as if the cumulative
drive of vanished and unsated years evoked the tangible phantom almost.
He actually felt it, soft and warm and clinging in his own, that was no
longer incomplete and mutilated.

Yet it was not he who led and guided now, but, more and more, he who
was being led. The hint had first betrayed its presence at the inn;
it now openly declared itself. It had crossed the frontier into a
positive sensation. Its growth, swiftly increasing all this time, had
accomplished itself; he had ignored, somehow, both its genesis and
quick development; the result he plainly recognised. She was expecting
him, indeed, but it was more than expectation; there was calling in
it--she summoned him. Her thought and longing reached him along that
old, invisible track love builds so easily between true, faithful
hearts. All the forces of her being, her very voice, came towards him
through the deepening autumn twilight. He had not noticed the curious
physical restoration in his hand, but he was vividly aware of this more
magical alteration--that _she_ led and guided him, drawing him ever
more swiftly towards the little, white garden gate where she stood at
this very moment, waiting. Her sweet strength compelled him; there was
this new touch of something irresistible about the familiar journey,
where formerly had been delicious yielding only, shy, tentative
advance. He realised it--inevitable.

His footsteps hurried, faster and ever faster; so deep was the
allurement in his blood, he almost ran. He reached the narrow, winding
lane, and raced along it. He knew each bend, each angle of the holly
hedge, each separate incident of ditch and stone. He could have plunged
blindfold down it at top speed. The familiar perfumes rushed at
him--dead leaves and mossy earth and ferns and dock leaves, bringing
the bewildering currents of strong emotion in him all together as in
a rising wave. He saw, then, the crumbling wall, the cedars topping
it with spreading branches, the chimneys of the rectory. On his right
bulked the outline of the old, grey church; the twisted, ancient yews,
the company of gravestones, upright and leaning, dotting the ground
like listening figures. But he looked at none of these. For, on his
left, he already saw the five rough steps of stone that led from the
lane towards a small, white garden gate. That gate at last shone before
him, rising through the misty air. He reached it.

He stopped dead a moment. His heart, it seemed, stopped too, then took
to violent hammering in his brain. There was a roaring in his mind, and
yet a marvellous silence--just behind it. Then the roar of emotion died
away. There was utter stillness. This stillness, silence, was all about
him. The world seemed preternaturally quiet.

But the pause was too brief to measure. For the tide of emotion had
receded only to come on again with redoubled power. He turned, leaped
forward, clambered impetuously up the rough stone steps, and flung
himself, breathless and exhausted, against the trivial barrier that
stood between his eyes and--hers. In his wild, half violent impatience,
however, he stumbled. That roaring, too, confused him. He fell forward,
it seemed, for twilight had merged in darkness, and he misjudged the
steps, the distances he yet knew so well. For a moment, certainly, he
lay at full length upon the uneven ground against the wall; the steps
had tripped him. And then he raised himself and knocked. His right hand
struck upon the small, white garden gate. Upon the two lost fingers he
felt the impact. "I am here," he cried, with a deep sound in his throat
as though utterance was choked and difficult. "I have come back--to
find you."

For a fraction of a second he waited, while the world stood still and
waited with him. But there was no delay. Her answer came at once: "I am
well.... I am happy.... I am waiting."

And the voice was dear and marvellous as of old. Though the words
were strange, reminding him of something dreamed, forgotten, lost,
it seemed, he did not take special note of them. He only wondered
that she did not open instantly that he might see her. Speech could
follow, but sight came surely first! There was this lightning-flash
of disappointment in him. Ah, she was lengthening out the marvellous
moment, as often and often she had done before. It was to tease him
that she made him wait. He knocked again; he pushed against the
unyielding surface. For he noticed that it was unyielding; and there
was a depth in the tender voice that he could not understand.

"Open!" he cried again, but louder than before. "I have come back to
find you!" And as he said it the mist struck cold and thick against his
face.

But her answer froze his blood.

"I cannot open."

And a sudden anguish of despair rose over him; the sound of her voice
was strange; in it was faintness, distance--as well as depth. It seemed
to echo. Something frantic seized him then--the panic sense.

"Open, open! Come out to me!" he tried to shout. His voice failed
oddly; there was no power in it. Something appalling struck him between
the eyes. "For God's sake, open. I'm waiting here! Open, and come out
to me!"

The reply was muffled by distance that already seemed increasing; he
was conscious of freezing cold about him--in his heart.

"I cannot open. You must come in to me. I'm here and--waiting--always."

He knew not exactly then what happened, for the cold grew deeper and
the icy mist was in his throat. No words would come. He rose to his
knees, and from his knees to his feet. He stooped. With all his force
he knocked again; in a blind frenzy of despair he hammered and beat
against the unyielding barrier of the small, white garden gate. He
battered it till the skin of his knuckles was torn and bleeding--the
first two fingers of a hand already mutilated. He remembers the torn
and broken skin, for he noticed in the gloom that stains upon the
gate bore witness to his violence; it was not till afterwards that
he remembered the other fact--that the hand had already suffered
mutilation, long, long years ago. The power of sound was feebly in
him; he called aloud; there was no answer. He tried to scream, but the
scream was muffled in his throat before it issued properly; it was a
nightmare scream. As a last resort he flung himself bodily upon the
unyielding gate, with such precipitate violence, moreover, that his
face struck against its surface.

From the friction, then, along the whole length of his cheek he knew
that the surface was not smooth. Cold and rough that surface was; but
also--it was not of wood. Moreover, there was writing on it he had not
seen before. How he deciphered it in the gloom, he never knew. The
lettering was deeply cut. Perhaps he traced it with his fingers; his
right hand certainly lay stretched upon it. He made out a name, a date,
a broken verse from the Bible, and the words, "died peacefully." The
lettering was sharply cut with edges that were new. For the date was of
a week ago; the broken verse ran, "When the shadows flee away ..." and
the small, white garden gate was unyielding because it was of--stone.

       *       *       *       *       *

At the inn he found himself staring at a table from which the tea
things had not been cleared away. There was a railway time-table in
his hands, and his head was bent forwards over it, trying to decipher
the lettering in the growing twilight. Beside him, still fingering a
shilling, stood the serving-girl; her other hand held a brown tray
with a running dog painted upon its dented surface. It swung to and
fro a little as she spoke, evidently continuing a conversation her
customer had begun. For she was giving information--in the colourless,
disinterested voice such persons use:

"We all went to the funeral, sir, all the country people went. The
grave was her father's--the family grave...." Then, seeing that her
customer was too absorbed in the time-table to listen further, she said
no more but began to pile the tea things on to the tray with noisy
clatter.

Ten minutes later, in the road, he stood hesitating. The signal at
the station just opposite was already down. The autumn mist was rising.
He looked along the winding road that melted away into the distance,
then slowly turned and reached the platform just as the London train
came in. He felt very old--too old to walk six miles....




II

THE TOUCH OF PAN


1

An idiot, Heber understood, was a person in whom intelligence had been
arrested--instinct acted, but not reason. A lunatic, on the other hand,
was some one whose reason had gone awry--the mechanism of the brain
was injured. The lunatic was out of relation with his environment; the
idiot had merely been delayed _en route_.

Be that as it might, he knew at any rate that a lunatic was not to
be listened to, whereas an idiot--well, the one he fell in love with
certainly had the secret of some instinctual knowledge that was not
only joy, but a kind of sheer natural joy. Probably it was that sheer
natural joy of living that reason argues to be untaught, degraded.
In any case--at thirty--he married her instead of the daughter of
a duchess he was engaged to. They lead to-day that happy, natural,
vagabond life called idiotic, unmindful of that world the majority of
reasonable people live only to remember.

Though born into an artificial social clique that made it difficult,
Heber had always loved the simple things. Nature, especially, meant
much to him. He would rather see a woodland misty with bluebells than
all the châteaux on the Loire; the thought of a mountain valley in the
dawn made his feet lonely in the grandest houses. Yet in these very
houses was his home established. Not that he under-estimated worldly
things--their value was too obvious--but that it was another thing he
wanted. Only he did not know precisely _what_ he wanted until this
particular idiot made it plain.

Her case was a mild one, possibly; the title bestowed by implication
rather than by specific mention. Her family did not say that she was
imbecile or half-witted, but that she "was not all there" they probably
did say. Perhaps she saw men as trees walking, perhaps she saw through
a glass darkly. Heber, who had met her once or twice, though never
yet to speak to, did not analyse her degree of sight, for in him,
personally, she woke a secret joy and wonder that almost involved a
touch of awe. The part of her that was not "all there" dwelt in an
"elsewhere" that he longed to know about. He wanted to share it with
her. She seemed aware of certain happy and desirable things that reason
and too much thinking hide.

He just felt this instinctively without analysis. The values they set
upon the prizes of life were similar. Money to her was just stamped
metal, fame a loud noise of sorts, position nothing. Of people she was
aware as a dog or bird might be aware--they were kind or unkind. Her
parents, having collected much metal and achieved position, proceeded
to make a loud noise of sorts with some success; and since she did
not contribute, either by her appearance or her tastes, to their
ambitions, they neglected her and made excuses. They were ashamed of
her existence. Her father in particular justified Nietzsche's shrewd
remark that no one with a loud voice can listen to subtle thoughts.

She was, perhaps, sixteen--for, though she looked it, eighteen or
nineteen was probably more in accord with her birth certificate. Her
mother was content, however, that she should dress the lesser age,
preferring to tell strangers that she was childish, rather than admit
that she was backward.

"You'll never marry at all, child, much less marry as you might," she
said, "if you go about with that rabbit expression on your face. That's
not the way to catch a nice young man of the sort we get down to stay
with us now. Many a chorus-girl with less than you've got has caught
them easily enough. Your sister's done well. Why not do the same?
There's nothing to be shy or frightened about."

"But I'm not shy or frightened, mother. I'm bored. I mean _they_ bore
me."

It made no difference to the girl; she was herself. The bored
expression in the eyes--the rabbit, not-all-there expression--gave
place sometimes to another look. Yet not often, nor with anybody. It
was this other look that stirred the strange joy in the man who fell in
love with her. It is not to be easily described. It was very wonderful.
Whether sixteen or nineteen, she then looked--a thousand.

       *       *       *       *       *

The house-party was of that up-to-date kind prevalent in Heber's
world. Husbands and wives were not asked together. There was a cynical
disregard of the decent (not the stupid) conventions that savoured
of abandon, perhaps of decadence. He only went himself in the hope
of seeing the backward daughter once again. Her millionaire parents
afflicted him, the smart folk tired him. Their peculiar affectation of
a special language, their strange belief that they were of importance,
their treatment of the servants, their calculated self-indulgence, all
jarred upon him more than usual. At bottom he heartily despised the
whole vapid set. He felt uncomfortable and out of place. Though not a
prig, he abhorred the way these folk believed themselves the climax of
fine living. Their open immorality disgusted him, their indiscriminate
love-making was merely rather nasty; he watched the very girl he was at
last to settle down with behaving as the tone of the clique expected
over her final fling--and, bored by the strain of so much "modernity,"
he tried to get away. Tea was long over, the sunset interval invited,
he felt hungry for trees and fields that were not self-conscious--and
he escaped. The flaming June day was turning chill. Dusk hovered over
the ancient house, veiling the pretentious new wing that had been
added. And he came across the idiot girl at the bend of the drive,
where the birch trees shivered in the evening wind. His heart gave a
leap.

She was leaning against one of the dreadful statues--it was a
satyr--that sprinkled the lawn. Her back was to him; she gazed at a
group of broken pine trees in the park beyond. He paused an instant,
then went on quickly, while his mind scurried to recall her name. They
were within easy speaking range.

"Miss Elizabeth!" he cried, yet not too loudly lest she might vanish
as suddenly as she had appeared. She turned at once. Her eyes and lips
were smiling welcome at him without pretence. She showed no surprise.

"You're the first one of the lot who's said it properly," she
exclaimed, as he came up. "Everybody calls me Elizabeth instead of
Elspeth. It's idiotic. They don't even take the trouble to get a name
right."

"It is," he agreed. "Quite idiotic." He did not correct her. Possibly
he had said Elspeth after all--the names were similar. Her perfectly
natural voice was grateful to his ear, and soothing. He looked at
her all over with an open admiration that she noticed and, without
concealment, liked. She was very untidy, the grey stockings on her
vigorous legs were torn, her short skirt was spattered with mud.
Her nut-brown hair, glossy and plentiful, flew loose about neck
and shoulders. In place of the usual belt she had tied a coloured
handkerchief round her waist. She wore no hat. What she had been doing
to get in such a state, while her parents entertained a "distinguished"
party, he did not know, but it was not difficult to guess. Climbing
trees or riding bareback and astride was probably the truth. Yet
her dishevelled state became her well, and the welcome in her face
delighted him. She remembered him, she was glad. He, too, was glad,
and a sense both happy and reckless stirred in his heart. "Like a wild
animal," he said, "you come out in the dusk----"

"To play with my kind," she answered in a flash, throwing him a glance
of invitation that made his blood go dancing.

He leaned against the statue a moment, asking himself why this young
Cinderella of a parvenu family delighted him when all the London
beauties left him cold. There was a lift through his whole being as
he watched her, slim and supple, grace shining through the untidy
modern garb--almost as though she wore no clothes. He thought of a
panther standing upright. Her poise was so alert--one arm upon the
marble ledge, one leg bent across the other, the hip-line showing like
a bird's curved wing. Wild animal or bird, flashed across his mind:
something untamed and natural. Another second, and she might leap
away--or spring into his arms.

It was a deep, stirring sensation in him that produced the mental
picture. "Pure and natural," a voice whispered with it in his heart,
"as surely as _they_ are just the other thing!" And the thrill struck
with unerring aim at the very root of that unrest he had always known
in the state of life to which he was called. She made it natural,
clean, and pure. This girl and himself were somehow kin. The primitive
thing broke loose in him.

In two seconds, while he stood with her beside the vulgar statue,
these thoughts passed through his mind. But he did not at first give
utterance to any of them. He spoke more formally, although laughter,
due to his happiness, lay behind:

"They haven't asked you to the party, then? Or you don't care about it?
Which is it?"

"Both," she said, looking fearlessly into his face. "But I've been here
ten minutes already. Why were you so long?"

This outspoken honesty was hardly what he expected, yet in another
sense he was not surprised. Her eyes were very penetrating, very
innocent, very frank. He felt her as clean and sweet as some young
fawn that asks plainly to be stroked and fondled. He told the truth:
"I couldn't get away before. I had to play about and----" when she
interrupted with impatience:

"_They_ don't really want you," she exclaimed scornfully. "I do."

And, before he could choose one out of the several answers that rushed
into his mind, she nudged him with her foot, holding it out a little so
that he saw the shoelace was unfastened. She nodded her head towards
it, and pulled her skirt up half an inch as he at once stooped down.

"And, anyhow," she went on as he fumbled with the lace, touching her
ankle with his hand, "you're going to marry one of them. I read it in
the paper. It's idiotic. You'll be miserable."

The blood rushed to his head, but whether owing to his stooping or to
something else, he could not say.

"I only came--I only accepted," he said quickly, "because I wanted to
see _you_ again."

"Of course. I made mother ask you."

He did an impulsive thing. Kneeling as he was, he bent his head a
little lower and suddenly kissed the soft grey stocking--then stood
up and looked her in the face. She was laughing happily, no sign of
embarrassment in her anywhere, no trace of outraged modesty. She just
looked very pleased.

"I've tied a knot that won't come undone in a hurry----" he began,
then stopped dead. For as he said it, gazing into her smiling face,
another expression looked forth at him from the two big eyes of
hazel. Something rushed from his heart to meet it. It may have been
that playful kiss, it may have been the way she took it; but, at any
rate, there was a strength in the new emotion that made him unsure of
who he was and of whom he looked at. He forgot the place, the time,
his own identity and hers. The lawn swept from beneath his feet, the
English sunset with it. He forgot his host and hostess, his fellow
guests, even his father's name and his own into the bargain. He was
carried away upon a great tide, the girl always beside him. He left the
shore-line in the distance, already half forgotten, the shore-line of
his education, learning, manners, social point of view--everything to
which his father had most carefully brought him up as the scion of an
old-established English family. This girl had torn up the anchor. Only
the anchor had previously been loosened a little by his own unconscious
and restless efforts....

Where was she taking him to? Upon what island would they land?

"I'm younger than you--a good deal," she broke in upon his rushing
mood. "But that doesn't matter a bit, does it? We're about the same age
really."

With the happy sound of her voice the extraordinary sensation
passed--or, rather, it became normal. But that it had lasted an
appreciable time was proved by the fact that they had left the statue
on the lawn, the house was no longer visible behind them, and they were
walking side by side between the massive rhododendron clumps. They
brought up against a five-barred gate into the park. They leaned upon
the topmost bar, and he felt her shoulder touching his--edging into
it--as they looked across to the grove of pines.

"I feel absurdly young," he said without a sign of affectation, "and
yet I've been looking for you a thousand years and more."

The afterglow lit up her face; it fell on her loose hair and tumbled
blouse, turning them amber red. She looked not only soft and comely,
but extraordinarily beautiful. The strange expression haunted the deep
eyes again, the lips were a little parted, the young breast heaving
slightly, joy and excitement in her whole presentment. And as he
watched her he knew that all he had just felt was due to her close
presence, to her atmosphere, her perfume, her physical warmth and
vigour. It had emanated directly from her being.

"Of course," she said, and laughed so that he felt her breath upon his
face. He bent lower to bring his own on a level, gazing straight into
her eyes that were fixed upon the field beyond. They were clear and
luminous as pools of water, and in their centre, sharp as a photograph,
he saw the reflection of the pine grove, perhaps a hundred yards
away. With detailed accuracy he saw it, empty and motionless in the
glimmering June dusk.

Then something caught his eye. He examined the picture more closely.
He drew slightly nearer. He almost touched her face with his own,
forgetting for a moment whose were the eyes that served him for a
mirror. For, looking intently thus, it seemed to him that there was
a movement, a passing to and fro, a stirring as of figures among the
trees.... Then suddenly the entire picture was obliterated. She had
dropped her lids. He heard her speaking--the warm breath was again upon
his face:

"In the heart of that wood dwell I."

His heart gave another leap--more violent than the first--for the
wonder and beauty of the sentence caught him like a spell. There was
a lilt and rhythm in the words that made it poetry. She laid emphasis
upon the pronoun and the nouns. It seemed the last line of some
delicious runic verse:

"In the _heart_ of the _wood_--dwell _I_...."

And it flashed across him: That living, moving, inhabited pine wood
was her thought. It was thus she saw it. Her nature flung back to a
life she understood, a life that needed, claimed her. The ostentatious
and artificial values that surrounded her, she denied, even as the
distinguished house-party of her ambitious, masquerading family
neglected her. Of course she was unnoticed by them, just as a swallow
or a wild-rose were unnoticed.

He knew her secret then, for she had told it to him. It was his own
secret too. They were akin, as the birds and animals were akin. They
belonged together in some free and open life, natural, wild, untamed.
That unhampered life was flowing about them now, rising, beating with
delicious tumult in her veins and his, yet innocent as the sunlight and
the wind--because it was as freely recognised.

"Elspeth!" he cried, "come, take me with you! We'll go at once.
Come--hurry--before we forget to be happy, or remember to be wise
again----!"

His words stopped half-way towards completion, for a perfume floated
past him, born of the summer dusk, perhaps, yet sweet with a
penetrating magic that made his senses reel with some remembered joy.
No flower, no scented garden bush delivered it. It was the perfume of
young, spendthrift life, sweet with the purity that reason had not yet
stained. The girl moved closer. Gathering her loose hair between her
fingers, she brushed his cheeks and eyes with it, her slim, warm body
pressing against him as she leaned over laughingly.

"In the darkness," she whispered in his ear; "when the moon puts the
house upon the statue!"

And he understood. Her world lay behind the vulgar, staring day. He
turned. He heard the flutter of skirts--just caught the grey stockings,
swift and light, as they flew behind the rhododendron masses. And she
was gone.

He stood a long time, leaning upon that five-barred gate.... It
was the dressing-gong that recalled him at length to what seemed the
present. By the conservatory door, as he went slowly in, he met his
distinguished cousin--who was helping the girl he himself was to marry
to enjoy her "final fling." He looked at his cousin. He realised
suddenly that he was merely vicious. There was no sun and wind, no
flowers--there was depravity only, lust instead of laughter, excitement
in place of happiness. It was calculated, not spontaneous. His mind was
in it. Without joy it was. He was not natural.

"Not a girl in the whole lot fit to look at," he exclaimed with peevish
boredom, excusing himself stupidly for his illicit conduct. "I'm
off in the morning." He shrugged his blue-blooded shoulders. "These
millionaires! Their shooting's all right, but their mixum-gatherum
week-ends--bah!" His gesture completed all he had to say about this one
in particular. He glanced sharply, nastily, at his companion. "_You_
look as if you'd found something!" he added, with a suggestive grin.
"Or have you seen the ghost that was paid for with the house?" And he
guffawed and let his eyeglass drop. "Lady Hermione will be asking for
an explanation--eh?"

"Idiot!" replied Heber, and ran upstairs to dress for dinner.

But the word was wrong, he remembered, as he closed his door. It was
lunatic he had meant to say, yet something more as well. He saw the
smart, modern philanderer somehow as a beast.


2

It was nearly midnight when he went up to bed, after an evening of
intolerable amusement. The abandoned moral attitude, the common
rudeness, the contempt of all others but themselves, the ugly jests,
the horseplay of tasteless minds that passed for gaiety, above all the
shamelessness of the women that behind the cover of fine breeding aped
emancipation, afflicted him to a boredom that touched desperation.

He understood now with a clarity unknown before. As with his cousin,
so with these. They took life, he saw, with a brazen effrontery they
thought was freedom, while yet it was life that they denied. He felt
vampired and degraded; spontaneity went out of him. The fact that
the geography of bedrooms was studied openly seemed an affirmation
of vice that sickened him. Their ways were nauseous merely. He
escaped--unnoticed.

He locked his door, went to the open window, and looked out into the
night--then started. For silver dressed the lawn and park, the shadow
of the building lay dark across the elaborate garden, and the moon, he
noticed, was just high enough to put the house upon the statue. The
chimney-stacks edged the pedestal precisely.

"Odd!" he exclaimed. "Odd that I should come at the very moment----!"
then smiled as he realised how his proposed adventure would be
misinterpreted, its natural innocence and spirit ruined--if he were
seen. "And some one would be sure to see me on a night like this. There
are couples still hanging about in the garden." And he glanced at the
shrubberies and secret paths that seemed to float upon the warm June
air like islands.

He stood for a moment framed in the glare of the electric light, then
turned back into the room; and at that instant a low sound like a
bird-call rose from the lawn below. It was soft and flutey, as though
some one played two notes upon a reed, a piping sound. He had been
seen, and she was waiting for him. Before he knew it, he had made an
answering call, of oddly similar kind, then switched the light out.
Three minutes later, dressed in simpler clothes, with a cap pulled over
his eyes, he reached the back lawn by means of the conservatory and the
billiard-room. He paused a moment to look about him. There was no one,
although the lights were still ablaze. "I am an idiot," he chuckled to
himself. "I'm acting on instinct!" He ran.

The sweet night air bathed him from head to foot; there was strength
and cleansing in it. The lawn shone wet with dew. He could almost smell
the perfume of the stars. The fumes of wine, cigars and artificial
scent were left behind, the atmosphere exhaled by civilisation, by
heavy thoughts, by bodies overdressed, unwisely stimulated--all, all
forgotten. He passed into a world of magical enchantment. The hush of
the open sky came down. In black and white the garden lay, brimmed full
with beauty, shot by the ancient silver of the moon, spangled with the
stars' old-gold. And the night wind rustled in the rhododendron masses
as he flew between them.

In a moment he was beside the statue, engulfed now by the shadow of
the building, and the girl detached herself silently from the blur of
darkness. Two arms were flung about his neck, a shower of soft hair
fell on his cheek with a heady scent of earth and leaves and grass, and
the same instant they were away together at full speed--towards the
pine wood. Their feet were soundless on the soaking grass. They went
so swiftly that they made a whir of following wind that blew her hair
across his eyes.

And the sudden contrast caused a shock that put a blank, perhaps,
upon his mind, so that he lost the standard of remembered things. For
it was no longer merely a particular adventure; it seemed a habit
and a natural joy resumed. It was not new. He knew the momentum of
an accustomed happiness, mislaid, it may be, but certainly familiar.
They sped across the gravel paths that intersected the well-groomed
lawn, they leaped the flower-beds, so laboriously shaped in mockery,
they clambered over the ornamental iron railings, scorning the easier
five-barred gate into the park. The longer grass then shook the dew
in soaking showers against his knees. He stooped, as though in some
foolish effort to turn up something, then realised that his legs, of
course, were bare. _Her_ garment was already high and free, for she,
too, was barelegged like himself. He saw her little ankles, wet and
shining in the moonlight, and flinging himself down, he kissed them
happily, plunging his face into the dripping, perfumed grass. Her
ringing laughter mingled with his own, as she stooped beside him the
same instant; her hair hung in a silver cloud; her eyes gleamed through
its curtain into his; then, suddenly, she soaked her hands in the heavy
dew and passed them over his face with a softness that was like the
touch of some scented southern wind.

"Now you are anointed with the Night," she cried. "No one will know
you. You are forgotten of the world. Kiss me!"

"We'll play for ever and ever," he cried, "the eternal game that was
old when the world was yet young," and lifting her in his arms he
kissed her eyes and lips. There was some natural bliss of song and
dance and laughter in his heart, an elemental bliss that caught them
together as wind and sunlight catch the branches of a tree. She leaped
from the ground to meet his swinging arms. He ran with her, then tossed
her off and caught her neatly as she fell. Evading a second capture,
she danced ahead, holding out one shining arm that he might follow.
Hand in hand they raced on together through the clean summer moonlight.
Yet there remained a smooth softness as of fur against his neck and
shoulders, and he saw then that she wore skins of tawny colour that
clung to her body closely, that he wore them too, and that her skin,
like his own, was of a sweet dusky brown.

Then, pulling her towards him, he stared into her face. She suffered
the close gaze a second, but no longer, for with a burst of sparkling
laughter again she leaped into his arms, and before he shook her free
she had pulled and tweaked the two small horns that hid in the thick
curly hair behind, and just above, the ears.

And that wilful tweaking turned him wild and reckless. That touch ran
down him deep into the mothering earth. He leaped and ran and sang with
a great laughing sound. The wine of eternal youth flushed all his veins
with joy, and the old, old world was young again with every impulse of
natural happiness intensified with the Earth's own foaming tide of life.

From head to foot he tingled with the delight of Spring, prodigal with
creative power. Of course he could fly the bushes and fling wild across
the open! Of course the wind and moonlight fitted close and soft about
him like a skin! Of course he had youth and beauty for playmates, with
dancing, laughter, singing, and a thousand kisses! For he and she were
natural once again. They were free together of those long-forgotten
days when "Pan leaped through the roses in the month of June...!"

With the girl swaying this way and that upon his shoulders, tweaking
his horns with mischief and desire, hanging her flying hair before
his eyes, then bending swiftly over again to lift it, he danced to
join the rest of their companions in the little moonlit grove of pines
beyond....


3

They rose somewhat pointed, perhaps, against the moonlight, those
English pines--more with the shape of cypresses, some might have
thought. A stream gushed down between their roots, there were mossy
ferns, and rough grey boulders with lichen on them. But there was
no dimness, for the silver of the moon sprinkled freely through the
branches like the faint sunlight that it really was, and the air ran
out to meet them with a heady fragrance that was wiser far than wine.

The girl, in an instant, was whirled from her perch on his shoulders
and caught by a dozen arms that bore her into the heart of the jolly,
careless throng. Whisht! Whew! Whir! She was gone, but another, fairer
still, was in her place, with skins as soft and knees that clung as
tightly. Her eyes were liquid amber, grapes hung between her little
breasts, her arms entwined about him, smoother than marble, and as
cool. She had a crystal laugh.

But he flung her off, so that she fell plump among a group of bigger
figures lolling against a twisted root and roaring with a jollity that
boomed like wind through the chorus of a song. They seized her, kissed
her, then sent her flying. They were happier with their glad singing.
They held stone goblets, red and foaming, in their broad-palmed hands.

"The mountains lie behind us!" cried a figure dancing past. "We are
come at last into our valley of delight. Grapes, breasts, and rich red
lips! Ho! Ho! It is time to press them that the juice of life may run!"
He waved a cluster of ferns across the air and vanished amid a cloud of
song and laughter.

"It is ours. Use it!" answered a deep, ringing voice. "The valleys are
our own. No climbing now!" And a wind of echoing cries gave answer from
all sides. "Life! Life! Life! Abundant, flowing over--use it, use it!"

A troop of nymphs rushed forth, escaped from clustering arms and lips
they yet openly desired. He chased them in and out among the waving
branches, while she who had brought him ever followed, and sped past
him and away again. He caught three gleaming soft brown bodies, then
fell beneath them, smothered, bubbling with joyous laughter--next freed
himself and, while they sought to drag him captive again, escaped and
raced with a leap upon a slimmer, sweeter outline that swung up--only
just in time--upon a lower bough, whence she leaned down above him with
hanging net of hair and merry eyes. A few feet beyond his reach, she
laughed and teased him--the one who had brought him in, the one he ever
sought, and who for ever sought him too....

It became a riotous glory of wild children who romped and played with
an impassioned glee beneath the moon. For the world was young and they,
her happy offspring, glowed with the life she poured so freely into
them. All intermingled, the laughing voices rose into a foam of song
that broke against the stars. The difficult mountains had been climbed
and were forgotten. Good! Then, enjoy the luxuriant, fruitful valley
and be glad! And glad they were, brimful with spontaneous energy,
natural as birds and animals that obeyed the big, deep rhythm of a
simpler age--natural as wind and innocent as sunshine.

Yet, for all the untamed riot, there was a lift of beauty pulsing
underneath. Even when the wildest abandon approached the heat of orgy,
when the recklessness appeared excess--there hid that marvellous touch
of loveliness which makes the natural sacred. There was coherence,
purpose, the fulfilling of an exquisite law: there was worship. The
form it took, haply, was strange as well as riotous, yet in its
strangeness dreamed innocence and purity, and in its very riot flamed
that spirit which is divine.

For he found himself at length beside her once again; breathless and
panting, her sweet brown limbs aglow from the excitement of escape
denied; eyes shining like a blaze of stars, and pulses beating with
tumultuous life--helpless and yielding against the strength that pinned
her down between the roots. His eyes put mastery on her own. She looked
up into his face, obedient, happy, soft with love, surrendered with the
same delicious abandon that had swept her for a moment into other arms.
"You caught me in the end," she sighed. "I only played awhile."

"I hold you for ever," he replied, half wondering at the rough power in
his voice.

It was here the hush of worship stole upon her little face, into her
obedient eyes, about her parted lips. She ceased her wilful struggling.

"Listen!" she whispered. "I hear a step upon the glades beyond. The
iris and the lily open; the earth is ready, waiting; we must be ready
too! _He_ is coming!"

He released her and sprang up; the entire company rose too. All stood,
all bowed the head. There was an instant's subtle panic, but it was
the panic of reverent awe that preludes a descent of deity. For a wind
passed through the branches with a sound that is the oldest in the
world and so the youngest. Above it there rose the shrill, faint piping
of a little reed. Only the first, true sounds were audible--wind and
water--the tinkling of the dewdrops as they fell, the murmur of the
trees against the air. This was the piping that they heard. And in the
hush the stars bent down to hear, the riot paused, the orgy passed and
died. The figures waited, kneeling then with one accord. They listened
with--the Earth.

"He comes.... He comes ..." the valley breathed about them.

There was a footfall from far away, treading across a world unruined
and unstained. It fell with the wind and water, sweetening the valley
into life as it approached. Across the rivers and forests it came
gently, tenderly, but swiftly and with a power that knew majesty.

"He comes.... He comes...!" rose with the murmur of the wind and
water from the host of lowered heads.

The footfall came nearer, treading a world grown soft with worship.
It reached the grove. It entered. There was a sense of intolerable
loveliness, of brimming life, of rapture. The thousand faces lifted
like a cloud. They heard the piping close. And so He came.

But He came with blessing. With the stupendous Presence there was joy,
the joy of abundant, natural life, pure as the sunlight and the wind.
He passed among them. There was great movement--as of a forest shaking,
as of deep water falling, as of a cornfield swaying to the wind, yet
gentle as of a harebell shedding its burden of dew that it has held
too long because of love. He passed among them, touching every head.
The great hand swept with tenderness each face, lingered a moment on
each beating heart. There was sweetness, peace, and loveliness; but
above all, there was--life. He sanctioned every natural joy in them and
blessed each passion with his power of creation.... Yet each one saw
him differently: some as a wife or maiden desired with fire, some as
a youth or stalwart husband, others as a figure veiled with stars or
cloaked in luminous mist, hardly attainable; others, again--the fewest
these, not more than two or three--as that mysterious wonder which
tempts the heart away from known familiar sweetness into a wilderness
of undecipherable magic without flesh and blood....

To two, in particular, He came so near that they could feel his breath
of hills and fields upon their eyes. He touched them with both mighty
hands. He stroked the marble breasts, He felt the little hidden horns
... and, as they bent lower so that their lips met together for an
instant, He took her arms and twined them about the curved, brown neck
that she might hold him closer still....

Again a footfall sounded far away upon an unruined world ... and He was
gone--back into the wind and water whence He came. The thousand faces
lifted; all stood up; the hush of worship still among them. There was a
quiet as of the dawn. The piping floated over woods and fields, fading
into silence. All looked at one another.... And then once more the
laughter and the play broke loose.


4

"We'll go," she cried, "and peep upon that other world where life
hangs like a prison on their eyes!" And, in a moment, they were across
the soaking grass, the lawn and flower-beds, and close to the walls
of the heavy mansion. He peered in through a window, lifting her up
to peer in with him. He recognised the world to which outwardly he
belonged; he understood; a little gasp escaped him; and a slight shiver
ran down the girl's body into his own. She turned her eyes away. "See,"
she murmured in his ear, "it's ugly, it's not natural. They feel guilty
and ashamed. There is no innocence!" She saw the men; it was the women
that he saw chiefly.

Lolling ungracefully, with a kind of boldness that asserted
independence, the women smoked their cigarettes with an air of
invitation they sought to conceal and yet showed plainly. He saw
his familiar world in nakedness. Their backs were bare, for all the
elaborate clothes they wore; they hung their breasts uncleanly; in
their eyes shone light that had never known the open sun. Hoping they
were alluring and desirable, they feigned a guilty ignorance of that
hope. They all pretended. Instead of wind and dew upon their hair, he
saw flowers grown artificially to ape wild beauty, tresses without
lustre borrowed from the slums of city factories. He watched them
manoeuvring with the men; heard dark sentences; caught gestures half
delivered whose meaning should just convey that glimpse of guilt they
deemed to increase pleasure. The women were calculating, but nowhere
glad; the men experienced, but nowhere joyous. Pretended innocence lay
cloaked with a veil of something that whispered secretly, clandestine,
ashamed, yet with a brazen air that laid mockery instead of sunshine in
their smiles. Vice masqueraded in the ugly shape of pleasure; beauty
was degraded into calculated tricks. They were not natural. They knew
not joy.

"The forward ones, the civilised!" she laughed in his ear, tweaking his
horns with energy. "_We_ are the backward!"

"Unclean," he muttered, recalling a catchword of the world he gazed
upon.

They were the civilised! They were refined and educated--advanced.
Generations of careful breeding, mate cautiously selecting mate,
laid the polish of caste upon their hands and faces where gleamed
ridiculous, untaught jewels--rings, bracelets, necklaces hanging
absurdly from every possible angle.

"But--they are dressed up--for fun," he exclaimed, more to himself than
to the girl in skins who clung to his shoulders with her naked arms.

"_Un_dressed!" she answered, putting her brown hand in play across his
eyes. "Only they have forgotten even that!" And another shiver passed
through her into him. He turned and hid his face against the soft skins
that touched his cheek. He kissed her body. Seizing his horns, she
pressed him to her, laughing happily.

"Look!" she whispered, raising her head again; "they're coming out."
And he saw that two of them, a man and a girl, with an interchange
of secret glances, had stolen from the room and were already by the
door of the conservatory that led into the garden. It was his wife to
be--and his distinguished cousin.

"Oh, Pan!" she cried in mischief. The girl sprang from his arms and
pointed. "We will follow them. We will put natural life into their
little veins!"

"Or panic terror," he answered, catching the yellow panther skin and
following her swiftly round the building. He kept in the shadow, though
she ran full into the blaze of moonlight. "But they can't see us,"
she called, looking over her shoulder a moment. "They can only feel
our presence, perhaps." And, as she danced across the lawn, it seemed
a moonbeam slipped from a sapling birch tree that the wind curved
earthwards, then tossed back against the sky.

Keeping just ahead, they led the pair, by methods known instinctively
to elemental blood yet not translatable--led them towards the little
grove of waiting pines. The night wind murmured in the branches; a bird
woke into a sudden burst of song. These sounds were plainly audible.
But four little pointed ears caught other, wilder notes behind the wind
and music of the bird--the cries and ringing laughter, the leaping
footsteps and the happy singing of their merry kin within the wood.

And the throng paused then amid the revels to watch the "civilised"
draw near. They presently reached the trees, halted, looked about them,
hesitated a moment--then, with a hurried movement as of shame and fear
lest they be caught, entered the zone of shadow.

"Let's go in here," said the man, without music in his voice. "It's dry
on the pine needles, and we can't be seen." He led the way; she picked
up her skirts and followed over the strip of long wet grass. "Here's a
log all ready for us," he added, sat down, and drew her into his arms
with a sigh of satisfaction. "Sit on my knee; it's warmer for your
pretty figure." He chuckled; evidently they were on familiar terms,
for though she hesitated, pretending to be coy, there was no real
resistance in her, and she allowed the ungraceful roughness. "But are
we _quite_ safe? Are you sure?" she asked between his kisses.

"What does it matter, even if we're not?" he replied, establishing her
more securely on his knees. "But, as a matter of fact, we're safer here
than in my own house." He kissed her hungrily. "By Jove, Hermione, but
you're divine," he cried passionately, "divinely beautiful. I love you
with every atom of my being--with my soul."

"Yes, dear, I know--I mean, I know you do, but----"

"But what?" he asked impatiently.

"Those detectives----"

He laughed. Yet it seemed to annoy him. "My wife is a beast, isn't
she?--to have me watched like that," he said quickly.

"They're everywhere," she replied, a sudden hush in her tone. She
looked at the encircling trees a moment, then added bitterly: "I hate
her, simply _hate_ her."

"I love you," he cried, crushing her to him, "that's all that matters
now. Don't let's waste time talking about the rest." She contrived to
shudder, and hid her face against his coat, while he showered kisses on
her neck and hair.

And the solemn pine trees watched them, the silvery moonlight fell on
their faces, the scent of new-mown hay went floating past.

"I love you with my very soul," he repeated with intense conviction.
"I'd do anything, give up anything, bear anything--just to give you a
moment's happiness. I swear it--before God!"

There was a faint sound among the trees behind them, and the girl sat
up, alert. She would have scrambled to her feet, but that he held her
tight.

"What the devil's the matter with you to-night?" he asked in a
different tone, his vexation plainly audible. "You're as nervy as if
_you_ were being watched, instead of me."

She paused before she answered, her finger on her lip. Then she said
slowly, hushing her voice a little:

"Watched! That's exactly what I did feel. I've felt it ever since we
came into the wood."

"Nonsense, Hermione. It's too many cigarettes." He drew her back into
his arms, forcing her head up so that he could kiss her better.

"I suppose it is nonsense," she said, smiling. "It's gone now, anyhow."

He began admiring her hair, her dress, her shoes, her pretty ankles,
while she resisted in a way that proved her practice. "It's not _me_
you love," she pouted, yet drinking in his praise. She listened to his
repeated assurances that he loved her with his "soul" and was prepared
for any sacrifice.

"I feel so safe with you," she murmured, knowing the moves in the game
as well as he did. She looked up guiltily into his face, and he looked
down with a passion that he thought perhaps was joy.

"You'll be married before the summer's out," he said, "and all the
thrill and excitement will be over. Poor Hermione!" She lay back in his
arms, drawing his face down with both hands, and kissing him on the
lips. "You'll have more of him than you can do with--eh? As much as you
care about, anyhow."

"I shall be much more free," she whispered. "Things will be easier. And
I've got to marry some one----"

She broke off with another start. There was a sound again behind them.
The man heard nothing. The blood in his temples pulsed too loudly,
doubtless.

"Well, what is it this time?" he asked sharply.

She was peering into the wood, where the patches of dark shadow and
moonlit spaces made odd, irregular patterns in the air. A low branch
waved slightly in the wind.

"Did you hear that?" she asked nervously.

"Wind," he replied, annoyed that her change of mood disturbed his
pleasure.

"But something moved----"

"Only a branch. We're quite alone, quite safe, I tell you," and
there was a rasping sound in his voice as he said it. "Don't be so
imaginative. I can take care of you."

She sprang up. The moonlight caught her figure, revealing its exquisite
young curves beneath the smother of the costly clothing. Her hair had
dropped a little in the struggle. The man eyed her eagerly, making a
quick, impatient gesture towards her, then stopped abruptly. He saw the
terror in her eyes.

"Oh, hark! What's that?" she whispered in a startled voice. She put her
finger up. "Oh, let's go back. I don't like this wood. I'm frightened."

"Rubbish," he said, and tried to catch her by the waist.

"It's safer in the house--my room--or yours----" She broke off again.
"There it is--don't you hear? It's a footstep!" Her face was whiter
than the moon.

"I tell you it's the wind in the branches," he repeated gruffly. "Oh,
come on, _do_. We were just getting jolly together. There's nothing to
be afraid of. Can't you believe me?" He tried to pull her down upon his
knee again with force. His face wore an unpleasant expression that was
half leer, half grin.

But the girl stood away from him. She continued to peer nervously about
her. She listened.

"You give me the creeps," he exclaimed crossly, clawing at her waist
again with passionate eagerness that now betrayed exasperation. His
disappointment turned him coarse.

The girl made a quick movement of escape, turning so as to look in
every direction. She gave a little scream.

"That _was_ a step. Oh, oh, it's close beside us. I heard it. We're
being watched!" she cried in terror. She darted towards him, then
shrank back. He did not try to touch her this time.

"Moonshine!" he growled. "You've spoilt my--spoilt our chance with your
silly nerves."

But she did not hear him apparently. She stood there shivering as with
sudden cold.

"There! I saw it again. I'm sure of it. Something went past me through
the air."

And the man, still thinking only of his own pleasure frustrated, got
up heavily, something like anger in his eyes. "All right," he said
testily; "if you're going to make a fuss, we'd better go. The house
_is_ safer, possibly, as you say. You know my room. Come along!" Even
that risk he would not take. He loved her with his "soul."

They crept stealthily out of the wood, the girl slightly in front of
him, casting frightened backward glances. Afraid, guilty, ashamed, with
an air as though they had been detected, they stole back towards the
garden and the house, and disappeared from view.

And a wind rose suddenly with a rushing sound, poured through the wood
as though to cleanse it, swept out the artificial scent and trace of
shame, and brought back again the song, the laughter, and the happy
revels. It roared across the park, it shook the windows of the house,
then sank away as quickly as it came. The trees stood motionless again,
guarding their secret in the clean, sweet moonlight that held the world
in dream until the dawn stole up and sunshine took the earth with joy.




III

THE WINGS OF HORUS


Binovitch had the bird in him somewhere: in his features, certainly,
with his piercing eye and hawk-like nose; in his movements, with
his quick way of flitting, hopping, darting; in the way he perched
on the edge of a chair; in the manner he pecked at his food; in his
twittering, high-pitched voice as well; and, above all, in his mind.
He skimmed all subjects and picked their heart out neatly, as a bird
skims lawn or air to snatch its prey. He had the bird's-eye view of
everything. He loved birds and understood them instinctively; could
imitate their whistling notes with astonishing accuracy. Their one
quality he had not was poise and balance. He was a nervous little man;
he was neurasthenic. And he was in Egypt by doctor's orders.

Such imaginative, unnecessary ideas he had! Such uncommon beliefs!

"The old Egyptians," he said laughingly, yet with a touch of solemn
conviction in his manner, "were a great people. Their consciousness was
different from ours. The bird idea, for instance, conveyed a sense of
deity to them--of bird deity, that is: they had sacred birds--hawks,
ibis, and so forth--and worshipped them." And he put his tongue out as
though to say with challenge, "Ha, ha!"

"They also worshipped cats and crocodiles and cows," grinned Palazov.
Binovitch seemed to dart across the table at his adversary. His eyes
flashed; his nose pecked the air. Almost one could imagine the beating
of his angry wings.

"Because everything alive," he half screamed, "was a symbol of some
spiritual power to them. Your mind is as literal as a dictionary and
as incoherent. Pages of ink without connected meaning! Verb always in
the infinitive! If you were an old Egyptian, you--you"--he flashed and
spluttered, his tongue shot out again, his keen eyes blazed--"you might
take all those words and spin them into a great interpretation of life,
a cosmic romance, as they did. Instead, you get the bitter, dead taste
of ink in your mouth, and spit it over us like that"--he made a quick
movement of his whole body as a bird that shakes itself--"in empty
phrases."

Khilkoff ordered another bottle of champagne, while Vera, his sister,
said half nervously, "Let's go for a drive; it's moonlight." There
was enthusiasm at once. Another of the party called the head waiter
and told him to pack food and drink in baskets. It was only eleven
o'clock. They would drive out into the desert, have a meal at two in
the morning, tell stories, sing, and see the dawn.

It was in one of those cosmopolitan hotels in Egypt which attract the
ordinary tourists as well as those who are doing a "cure," and all
these Russians were ill with one thing or another. All were ordered
out for their health, and all were the despair of their doctors. They
were as unmanageable as a bazaar and as incoherent. Excess and bed were
their routine. They lived, but none of them got better. Equally, none
of them got angry. They talked in this strange personal way without a
shred of malice or offence. The English, French, and Germans in the
hotel watched them with remote amazement, referring to them as "that
Russian lot." Their energy was elemental. They never stopped. They
merely disappeared when the pace became too fast, then reappeared again
after a day or two, and resumed their "living" as before. Binovitch,
despite his neurasthenia, was the life of the party. He was also a
special patient of Dr. Plitzinger, the famous psychiatrist, who took
a peculiar interest in his case. It was not surprising. Binovitch was
a man of unusual ability and of genuine, deep culture. But there was
something more about him that stimulated curiosity. There was this
striking originality. He said and did surprising things.

"I could fly if I wanted to," he said once when the airmen came to
astonish the natives with their biplanes over the desert, "but without
all that machinery and noise. It's only a question of believing and
understanding----"

"Show us!" they cried. "Let's see you fly!"

"He's got it! He's off again! One of his impossible moments."

These occasions when Binovitch let himself go always proved wildly
entertaining. He said monstrously incredible things as though he
really did believe them. They loved his madness, for it gave them new
sensations.

"It's only levitation, after all, this flying," he exclaimed, shooting
out his tongue between the words, as his habit was when excited; "and
what is levitation but a power of the air? None of you can hang an
orange in space for a second, with all your scientific knowledge; but
the moon is always levitated perfectly. And the stars. D'you think they
swing on wires? What raised the enormous stones of ancient Egypt? D'you
really believe it was heaped-up sand and ropes and clumsy leverage
and all our weary and laborious mechanical contrivances? Bah! It was
levitation. It was the powers of the air. Believe in those powers,
and gravity becomes a mere nursery trick--true where it is, but true
nowhere else. To know the fourth dimension is to step out of a locked
room and appear instantly on the roof or in another country altogether.
To know the powers of the air, similarly, is to annihilate what you
call weight--and fly."

"Show us, show us!" they cried, roaring with delighted laughter.

"It's a question of belief," he repeated, his tongue appearing and
disappearing like a pointed shadow. "It's in the heart; the power of
the air gets into your whole being. Why should I show you? Why should I
ask my deity to persuade your scoffing little minds by any miracle? For
it is deity, I tell you, and nothing else. I _know_ it. Follow one idea
like that, as I follow my bird idea--follow it with the impetus and
undeviating concentration of a projectile--and you arrive at power. You
know deity--the bird idea of deity, that is. _They_ knew that. The old
Egyptians knew it."

"Oh, show us, show us!" they shouted impatiently, wearied of his
nonsense-talk. "Get up and fly! Levitate yourself, as they did! Become
a star!"

Binovitch turned suddenly very pale, and an odd light shone in his keen
brown eyes. He rose slowly from the edge of the chair where he was
perched. Something about him changed. There was silence instantly.

"I _will_ show you," he said calmly, to their intense amazement; "not
to convince your disbelief, but to prove it to myself. For the powers
of the air are with me here. I believe. And Horus, great falcon-headed
symbol, is my patron god."

The suppressed energy in his voice and manner was indescribable. There
was a sense of lifting, upheaving power about him. He raised his arms;
his face turned upward; he inflated his lungs with a deep, long breath,
and his voice broke into a kind of singing cry, half prayer, half chant:

    "O Horus,
     Bright-eyed deity of wind,
  [1]Feather my soul
     Though earth's thick air,
     To know thy awful swiftness----"

  [1] The Russian is untranslatable. The phrase means, "Give my
      life wings."

He broke off suddenly. He climbed lightly and swiftly upon the nearest
table--it was in a deserted card-room, after a game in which he had
lost more pounds than there are days in the year--and leaped into the
air. He hovered a second, spread his arms and legs in space, appeared
to float a moment, then buckled, rushed down and forward, and dropped
in a heap upon the floor, while every one roared with laughter.

But the laughter died out quickly, for there was something in his wild
performance that was peculiar and unusual. It was uncanny, not quite
natural. His body had seemed, as with Mordkin and Nijinski, literally
to hang upon the air a moment. For a second he gave the distressing
impression of overcoming gravity. There was a touch in it of that faint
horror which appals by its very vagueness. He picked himself up unhurt,
and his face was as grave as a portrait in the academy, but with a new
expression in it that everybody noticed with this strange, half-shocked
amazement. And it was this expression that extinguished the claps of
laughter as wind that takes away the sound of bells. Like many ugly
men, he was an inimitable actor, and his facial repertory was endless
and incredible. But this was neither acting nor clever manipulation
of expressive features. There was something in his curious Russian
physiognomy that made the heart beat slower. And that was why the
laughter died away so suddenly.

"You ought to have flown farther," cried some one. It expressed what
all had felt.

"Icarus didn't drink champagne," another replied, with a laugh; but
nobody laughed with him.

"You went too near to Vera," said Palazov, "and passion melted the
wax." But his face twitched oddly as he said it. There was something he
did not understand, and so heartily disliked.

The strange expression on the features deepened. It was arresting
in a disagreeable, almost in a horrible, way. The talk stopped dead;
all stared; there was a feeling of dismay in everybody's heart,
yet unexplained. Some lowered their eyes, or else looked stupidly
elsewhere; but the women of the party felt a kind of fascination. Vera,
in particular, could not move her sight away. The joking reference to
his passionate admiration for her passed unnoticed. There was a general
and individual sense of shock. And a chorus of whispers rose instantly:

"Look at Binovitch! What's happened to his face?"

"He's changed--he's changing!"

"God! Why he looks like a--bird!"

But no one laughed. Instead, they chose the names of birds--hawk,
eagle, even owl. The figure of a man leaning against the edge of the
door, watching them closely, they did not notice. He had been passing
down the corridor, had looked in unobserved, and then had paused. He
had seen the whole performance. He watched Binovitch narrowly, now with
calm, discerning eyes. It was Dr Plitzinger, the great psychiatrist.

For Binovitch had picked himself up from the floor in a way that was
oddly self-possessed, and precluded the least possibility of the
ludicrous. He looked neither foolish nor abashed. He looked surprised,
but also he looked half angry and half frightened. As some one had
said, he "ought to have flown farther." That was the incredible
impression his acrobatics had produced--incredible, yet somehow actual.
This uncanny idea prevailed, as at a séance where nothing genuine is
expected to happen, and something genuine, after all, does happen.
There was no pretence in this: Binovitch had flown.

And now he stood there, white in the face--with terror and with
anger white. He looked extraordinary, this little, neurasthenic
Russian, but he looked at the same time half terrific. Another thing,
not commonly experienced by men, was in him, breaking out of him,
affecting _directly_ the minds of his companions. His mouth opened;
blood and fury shone in his blazing eyes; his tongue shot out like an
ant-eater's, though even in that the comic had no place. His arms were
spread like flapping wings, and his voice rose dreadfully:

"He failed me, he failed me!" he tried to bellow. "Horus, my
falcon-headed deity, my power of the air, deserted me! Hell take him!
Hell burn his wings and blast his piercing sight! Hell scorch him into
dust for his false prophecies! I curse him--I curse Horus!"

The voice that should have roared across the silent room emitted,
instead, this high-pitched, bird-like scream. The added touch of sound,
the reality it lent, was ghastly. Yet it was marvellously done and
acted. The entire thing was a bit of instantaneous inspiration--his
voice, his words, his gestures, his whole wild appearance. Only--here
was the reality that caused the sense of shock--the expression on
his altered features was genuine. _That_ was not assumed. There was
something new and alien in him, something cold and difficult to human
life, something alert and swift and cruel, of another element than
earth. A strange, rapacious grandeur had leaped upon the struggling
features. The face looked hawk-like.

And he came forward suddenly and sharply toward Vera, whose fixed,
staring eyes had never once ceased watching him with a kind of
anxious and devouring pain in them. She was both drawn and beaten
back. Binovitch advanced on tiptoe. No doubt he still was acting,
still pretending this mad nonsense that he worshipped Horus, the
falcon-headed deity of forgotten days, and that Horus had failed him in
his hour of need; but somehow there was just a hint of too much reality
in the way he moved and looked. The girl, a little creature, with
fluffy golden hair, opened her lips; her cigarette fell to the floor;
she shrank back; she looked for a moment like some smaller, coloured
bird trying to escape from a great pursuing hawk; she screamed.
Binovitch, his arms wide, his bird-like face thrust forward, had
swooped upon her. He leaped. Almost he caught her.

No one could say exactly what happened. Play, become suddenly and
unexpectedly too real, confuses the emotions. The change of key was
swift. From fun to terror is a dislocating jolt upon the mind. Some
one--it was Khilkoff, the brother--upset a chair; everybody spoke at
once; everybody stood up. An unaccountable feeling of disaster was in
the air, as with those drinkers' quarrels that blaze out from nothing,
and end in a pistol-shot and death, no one able to explain clearly how
it came about. It was the silent, watching figure in the doorway who
saved the situation. Before any one had noticed his approach, there he
was among the group, laughing, talking, applauding--between Binovitch
and Vera. He was vigorously patting his patient on the back, and his
voice rose easily above the general clamour. He was a strong, quiet
personality; even in his laughter there was authority. And his laughter
now was the only sound in the room, as though by his mere presence
peace and harmony were restored. Confidence came with him. The noise
subsided; Vera was in her chair again. Khilkoff poured out a glass of
wine for the great man.

"The Czar!" said Plitzinger, sipping his champagne, while all stood
up, delighted with his compliment and tact. "And to your opening
night with the Russian ballet," he added quickly a second toast, "or
to your first performance at the Moscow Théâtre des Arts!" Smiling
significantly, he glanced at Binovitch; he clinked glasses with him.
Their arms were already linked, but it was Palazov who noticed that
the doctor's fingers seemed rather tight upon the creased black coat.
All drank, looking with laughter, yet with a touch of respect, toward
Binovitch, who stood there dwarfed beside the stalwart Austrian, and
suddenly as meek and subdued as any mole. Apparently the abrupt change
of key had taken his mind successfully off something else.

"Of course--'The Fire-Bird,'" exclaimed the little man, mentioning the
famous Russian ballet. "The very thing!" he exclaimed. "For _us_," he
added, looking with devouring eyes at Vera. He was greatly pleased.
He began talking vociferously about dancing and the rationale of
dancing. They told him he was an undiscovered master. He was delighted.
He winked at Vera and touched her glass again with his. "We'll make
our début together," he cried. "We'll begin at Covent Garden, in
London. I'll design the dresses and the posters 'The Hawk and the
Dove!' _Magnifique!_ I in dark grey, and you in blue and gold! Ah,
dancing, you know, is sacred. The little self is lost, absorbed. It is
ecstasy, it is divine. And dancing in air--the passion of the birds
and stars--ah! they are the movements of the gods. You know deity that
way--by living it."

He went on and on. His entire being had shifted with a leap upon this
new subject. The idea of realising divinity by dancing it absorbed
him. The party discussed it with him as though nothing else existed
in the world, all sitting now and talking eagerly together. Vera
took the cigarette he offered her, lighting it from his own; their
fingers touched; he was as harmless and normal as a retired diplomat
in a drawing-room. But it was Plitzinger whose subtle manoeuvring
had accomplished the change so cleverly, and it was Plitzinger who
presently suggested a game of billiards, and led him off, full now of
a fresh enthusiasm for cannons, balls, and pockets, into another room.
They departed arm in arm, laughing and talking together.

Their departure, it seemed, made no great difference at first. Vera's
eyes watched him out of sight, then turned to listen to Baron Minski,
who was describing with gusto how he caught wolves alive for coursing
purposes. The speed and power of the wolf, he said, was impossible to
realise; the force of their awful leap, the strength of their teeth,
which could bite through metal stirrup-fastenings. He showed a scar on
his arm and another on his lip. He was telling truth, and everybody
listened with deep interest. The narrative lasted perhaps ten minutes
or more, when Minski abruptly stopped. He had come to an end; he looked
about him; he saw his glass, and emptied it. There was a general pause.
Another subject did not at once present itself. Sighs were heard;
several fidgeted; fresh cigarettes were lighted. But there was no sign
of boredom, for where one or two Russians are gathered together there
is always life. They produce gaiety and enthusiasm as wind produces
waves. Like great children, they plunge whole-heartedly into whatever
interest presents itself at the moment. There is a kind of uncouth
gambolling in their way of taking life. It seems as if they are always
fighting that deep, underlying, national sadness which creeps into
their very blood.

"Midnight!" then exclaimed Palazov, abruptly, looking at his watch;
and the others fell instantly to talking about that watch, admiring
it and asking questions. For the moment that very ordinary timepiece
became the centre of observation. Palazov mentioned the price. "It
never stops," he said proudly, "not even under water." He looked up at
everybody, challenging admiration. And he told how, at a country house,
he made a bet that he would swim to a certain island in the lake, and
won the bet. He and a girl were the winners, but as it was a horse they
had bet, he got nothing out of it for himself, giving the horse to her.
It was a genuine grievance in him. One felt he could have cried as he
spoke of it. "But the watch went all the time," he said delightedly,
holding the gun-metal object in his hand to show, "and I was twelve
minutes in the water with my clothes on."

Yet this fragmentary talk was nothing but pretence. The sound of
clicking billiard-balls was audible from the room at the end of the
corridor. There was another pause. The pause, however, was intentional.
It was not vacuity of mind or absence of ideas that caused it. There
was another subject, an unfinished subject that each member of the
group was still considering. Only no one cared to begin about it
till at last, unable to resist the strain any longer, Palazov turned
to Khilkoff, who was saying he would take a "whisky-soda," as the
champagne was too sweet, and whispered something beneath his breath;
whereupon Khilkoff, forgetting his drink, glanced at his sister,
shrugged his shoulders, and made a curious grimace. "He's all right
now"--his reply was just audible--"he's with Plitzinger." He cocked his
head sidewise to indicate that the clicking of the billiard-balls still
was going on.

The subject was out: all turned their heads; voices hummed and buzzed;
questions were asked and answered or half answered; eyebrows were
raised, shoulders shrugged, hands spread out expressively. There came
into the atmosphere a feeling of presentiment, of mystery, of things
half understood; primitive, buried instinct stirred a little, the kind
of racial dread of vague emotions that might gain the upper hand if
encouraged. They shrank from looking something in the face, while yet
this unwelcome influence drew closer round them all. They discussed
Binovitch and his astonishing performance. Pretty little Vera listened
with large and troubled eyes, though saying nothing. The Arab waiter
had put out the lights in the corridor, and only a solitary cluster
burned now above their heads, leaving their faces in shadow. In the
distance the clicking of the billiard-balls still continued.

"It was not play; it was real," exclaimed Minski vehemently. "I can
catch wolves," he blurted; "but birds--ugh!--and human birds!" He was
half inarticulate. He had witnessed something he could not understand,
and it had touched instinctive terror in him. "It was the way he
leaped that put the wolf first into my mind, only it was not a wolf at
all." The others agreed and disagreed. "It was play at first, but it
was reality at the end," another whispered; "and it was no animal he
mimicked, but a bird, and a bird of prey at that!"

Vera thrilled. In the Russian woman hides that touch of savagery which
loves to be caught, mastered, swept helplessly away, captured utterly
and deliciously by the one strong enough to do it thoroughly. She left
her chair and sat down beside an older woman in the party, who took
her arm quietly at once. Her little face wore a perplexed expression,
mournful, yet somehow wild. It was clear that Binovitch was not
indifferent to her.

"It's become an _idée fixe_ with him," this older woman said. "The
bird idea lives in his mind. He lives it in his imagination. Ever
since that time at Edfu, when he pretended to worship the great stone
falcons outside the temple--the Horus figures--he's been full of it."
She stopped. The way Binovitch had behaved at Edfu was better left
unmentioned at the moment, perhaps. A slight shiver ran round the
listening group, each one waiting for some one else to focus their
emotion, and so explain it by saying the convincing thing. Only no one
ventured. Then Vera abruptly gave a little jump.

"Hark!" she exclaimed, in a staccato whisper, speaking for the first
time. She sat bolt upright. She was listening. "Hark!" she repeated.
"There it is again, but nearer than before. It's coming closer. I
hear it." She trembled. Her voice, her manner, above all her great
staring eyes, startled everybody. No one spoke for several seconds; all
listened. The clicking of the billiard-balls had ceased. The halls and
corridors lay in darkness, and gloom was over the big hotel. Everybody
was in bed.

"Hear what?" asked the older woman soothingly, yet with a perceptible
quaver in her voice, too. She was aware that the girl's arm shook upon
her own.

"Do you not hear it, too?" the girl whispered.

All listened without speaking. All watched her paling face. Something
wonderful, yet half terrible, seemed in the air about them. There was a
dull murmur, audible, faint, remote, its direction hard to tell. It had
come suddenly from nowhere. They shivered. That strange racial thrill
again passed into the group, unwelcome, unexplained. It was aboriginal;
it belonged to the unconscious primitive mind, half childish, half
terrifying.

"_What_ do you hear?" her brother asked angrily--the irritable anger of
nervous fear.

"When he came at me," she answered very low, "I heard it first. I hear
it now again. Listen! He's coming."

And at that minute, out of the dark mouth of the corridor, emerged two
human figures, Plitzinger and Binovitch. Their game was over: they
were going up to bed. They passed the open door of the card-room.
But Binovitch was being half dragged, half restrained, for he was
apparently attempting to run down the passage with flying, dancing
leaps. He bounded. It was like a huge bird trying to rise for flight,
while his companion kept him down by force upon the earth. As they
entered the strip of light, Plitzinger changed his own position,
placing himself swiftly between his companion and the group in the dark
corner of the room. He hurried Binovitch along as though he sheltered
him from view. They passed into the shadows down the passage. They
disappeared. And every one looked significantly, questioningly, at his
neighbour, though at first saying no word. It seemed that a curious
disturbance of the air had followed them audibly.

Vera was the first to open her lips. "You heard it _then_," she said
breathlessly, her face whiter than the ceiling.

"Damn!" exclaimed her brother furiously. "It was wind against the
outside walls--wind in the desert. The sand is driving."

Vera looked at him. She shrank closer against the side of the older
woman, whose arm was tight about her.

"It was _not_ wind," she whispered simply. She paused. All waited
uneasily for the completion of her sentence. They stared into her face
like peasants who expected a miracle.

"Wings," she whispered. "It was the sound of enormous wings."

       *       *       *       *       *

And at four o'clock in the morning, when they all returned exhausted
from their excursion into the desert, little Binovitch was sleeping
soundly and peacefully in his bed. They passed his door on tiptoe.
But he did not hear them. He was dreaming. His spirit was at Edfu,
experiencing with that ancient deity who was master of all flying life
those strange enjoyments upon which his own troubled human heart was
passionately set. Safe with that mighty falcon whose powers his lips
had scorned a few hours before, his soul, released in vivid dream, went
sweetly flying. It was amazing, it was gorgeous. He skimmed the Nile
at lightning speed. Dashing down headlong from the height of the great
Pyramid, he chased with faultless accuracy a little dove that sought
vainly to hide from his terrific pursuit beneath the palm trees. For
what he loved must worship where he worshipped, and the majesty of
those tremendous effigies had fired his imagination to the creative
point where expression was imperative.

Then suddenly, at the very moment of delicious capture, the dream
turned horrible, becoming awful with the nightmare touch. The sky lost
all its blue and sunshine. Far, far below him the little dove enticed
him into nameless depths, so that he flew faster and faster, yet never
fast enough to overtake it. Behind him came a great thing down the air,
black, hovering, with gigantic wings outstretched. It had terrific
eyes, and the beating of its feathers stole his wind away. It followed
him, crowding space. He was aware of a colossal beak, curved like a
scimitar and pointed wickedly like a tooth of iron. He dropped. He
faltered. He tried to scream.

Through empty space he fell, caught by the neck. The huge spectral
falcon was upon him. The talons were in his heart. And in sleep he
remembered then that he had cursed. He recalled his reckless language.
The curse of the ignorant is meaningless; that of the worshipper is
real. This attack was on his soul. He had invoked it. He realised
next, with a touch of ghastly horror, that the dove he chased was,
after all, the bait that had lured him purposely to destruction, and
awoke with a suffocating terror upon him, and his entire body bathed
in icy perspiration. Outside the open window he heard a sound of wings
retreating with powerful strokes into the surrounding darkness of the
sky.

The nightmare made its impression upon Binovitch's impressionable and
dramatic temperament. It aggravated his tendencies. He related it next
day to Mme. de Drühn, the friend of Vera, telling it with that somewhat
boisterous laughter some minds use to disguise less kind emotions.
But he received no encouragement. The mood of the previous night was
not recoverable; it was already ancient history. Russians never make
the banal mistake of repeating a sensation till it is exhausted;
they hurry on to novelties. Life flashes and rushes with them, never
standing still for exposure before the cameras of their minds. Mme. de
Drühn, however, took the trouble to mention the matter to Plitzinger,
for Plitzinger, like Freud of Vienna, held that dreams revealed
subconscious tendencies which sooner or later must betray themselves in
action.

"Thank you for telling me," he smiled politely, "but I have already
heard it from him." He watched her eyes for a moment, really examining
her soul. "Binovitch, you see," he continued, apparently satisfied with
what he saw, "I regard as that rare phenomenon--a genius without an
outlet. His spirit, intensely creative, finds no adequate expression.
His power of production is enormous and prolific; yet he accomplishes
nothing." He paused an instant. "Binovitch, therefore, is in danger of
poisoning--himself." He looked steadily into her face, as a man who
weighs how much he may confide. "Now," he continued, "_if_ we can find
an outlet for him, a field wherein his bursting imaginative genius
can produce results--above all, _visible_ results"--he shrugged his
shoulders--"the man is saved. Otherwise"--he looked extraordinarily
impressive--"there is bound to be sooner or later----"

"Madness?" she asked very quietly.

"An explosion, let us say," he replied gravely. "For instance, take
this Horus obsession of his, quite wrong archæologically though it is.
_Au fond_ it is megalomania of a most unusual kind. His passionate
interest, his love, his worship of birds, wholesome enough in itself,
finds no satisfying outlet. A man who _really_ loves birds neither
keeps them in cages nor shoots them nor stuffs them. What, then, can he
do? The commonplace bird-lover observes them through glasses, studies
their habits, then writes a book about them. But a man like Binovitch,
overflowing with this intense creative power of mind and imagination,
is not content with that. He wants to know them from within. He wants
to feel what they feel, to live their life. He wants to _become_ them.
You follow me? Not quite. Well, he seeks to be identified with the
object of his sacred, passionate adoration. All genius seeks to know
the thing itself from its own point of view. It desires union. That
tendency, unrecognised by himself, perhaps, and therefore subconscious,
hides in his very soul." He paused a moment. "And the sudden sight
of those majestic figures at Edfu--that crystallisation of his _idée
fixe_ in granite--took hold of this excess in him, so to speak--and is
now focusing it toward some definite act. Binovitch sometimes--feels
himself a bird! You noticed what occurred last night?"

She nodded; a slight shiver passed over her.

"A most curious performance," she murmured; "an exhibition I never want
to see again."

"The most curious part," replied the doctor coolly, "was its truth."

"Its truth!" she exclaimed beneath her breath. She was frightened by
something in his voice and by the uncommon gravity in his eyes. It
seemed to arrest her intelligence. She felt upon the edge of things
beyond her. "You mean that Binovitch did for a moment--hang--in the
air?" The other verb, the right one, she could not bring herself to use.

The great man's face was enigmatical. He talked to her sympathy,
perhaps, rather than to her mind.

"Real genius," he said smilingly, "is as rare as talent, even great
talent, is common. It means that the personality, if only for one
second, becomes everything; becomes the universe; becomes the soul
of the world. It gets the flash. It is identified with the universal
life. Being everything and everywhere, all is possible to it--in that
second of vivid realisation. It can brood with the crystal, grow with
the plant, leap with the animal, fly with the bird: genius unifies
all three. That is the meaning of 'creative.' It is faith. Knowing
it, you can pass through fire and not be burned, walk on water and
not sink, move a mountain, fly. Because you _are_ fire, water, earth,
air. Genius, you see, is madness in the magnificent sense of being
superhuman. Binovitch has it."

He broke off abruptly, seeing he was not understood. Some great
enthusiasm in him he deliberately suppressed.

"The point is," he resumed, speaking more carefully, "that we must try
to lead this passionate constructive genius of the man into some human
channel that will absorb it, and therefore render it harmless."

"He loves Vera," the woman said, bewildered, yet seizing this point
correctly.

"But would he marry her?" asked Plitzinger at once.

"He is already married."

The doctor looked steadily at her a moment, hesitating whether he
should utter all his thought.

"In that case," he said slowly after a pause, "it is better he or she
should leave."

His tone and manner were exceedingly impressive.

"You mean there's danger?" she asked.

"I mean, rather," he replied earnestly, "that this great creative flood
in him, so curiously focused now upon his Horus-falcon-bird idea, may
result in some act of violence----"

"Which would be madness," she said, looking hard at him.

"Which would be disastrous," he corrected her. And then he added
slowly: "Because in the mental moment of immense creation he might
overlook material laws."

       *       *       *       *       *

The costume ball two nights later was a great success. Palazov was
a Bedouin, and Khilkoff an Apache; Mme. de Drühn wore a national
head-dress; Minski looked almost natural as Don Quixote; and the entire
Russian "set" was cleverly, if somewhat extravagantly, dressed. But
Binovitch and Vera were the most successful of all the two hundred
dancers who took part. Another figure, a big man dressed as a Pierrot,
also claimed exceptional attention, for though the costume was
commonplace enough, there was something of dignity in his appearance
that drew the eyes of all upon him. But he wore a mask, and his
identity was not discoverable.

It was Binovitch and Vera, however, who must have won the prize,
if prize there had been, for they not only looked their parts, but
acted them as well. The former in his dark grey feather tunic, and
his falcon mask, complete even to the brown hooked beak and tufted
talons, looked fierce and splendid. The disguise was so admirable,
yet so entirely natural, that it was uncommonly seductive. Vera, in
blue and gold, a charming head-dress of a dove upon her loosened hair,
and a pair of little dove-pale wings fluttering from her shoulders,
her tiny twinkling feet and slender ankles well visible, too, was
equally successful and admired. Her large and timid eyes, her flitting
movements, her light and dainty way of dancing--all added touches that
made the picture perfect.

How Binovitch contrived his dress remained a mystery, for the layers
of wings upon his back were real; the large black kites that haunt
the Nile, soaring in their hundreds over Cairo and the bleak Mokattam
Hills, had furnished them. He had procured them none knew how. They
measured four feet across from tip to tip; they swished and rustled
as he swept along; they were true falcons' wings. He danced with
Nautch-girls and Egyptian princesses and Rumanian Gipsies; he danced
well, with beauty, grace, and lightness. But with Vera he did not dance
at all; with her he simply flew. A kind of passionate abandon was in
him as he skimmed the floor with her in a way that made everybody
turn to watch them. They seemed to leave the ground together. It was
delightful, an amazing sight; but it was peculiar. The strangeness of
it was on many lips. Somehow its queer extravagance communicated itself
to the entire ball-room. They became the centre of observation. There
were whispers.

"There's that extraordinary bird-man! Look! He goes by like a hawk. And
he's always after that dove-girl. How marvellously he does it! It's
rather awful. Who is he? I don't envy _her_."

People stood aside when he rushed past. They got out of his way. He
seemed forever pursuing Vera, even when dancing with another partner.
Word passed from mouth to mouth. A kind of telepathic interest was
established everywhere. It was a shade too real sometimes, something
unduly earnest in the chasing wildness, something unpleasant. There was
even alarm.

"It's rowdy; I'd rather not see it; it's quite disgraceful," was heard.
"_I_ think it's horrible; you can see she's terrified."

And once there was a little scene, trivial enough, yet betraying this
reality that many noticed and disliked. Binovitch came up to claim
a dance, programme clutched in his great tufted claws, and at the
same moment the big Pierrot appeared abruptly round the corner with a
similar claim. Those who saw it assert he had been waiting, and came
on purpose, and that there was something protective and authoritative
in his bearing. The misunderstanding was ordinary enough--both men had
written her name against the dance--but "No. 13, Tango" also included
the supper interval, and neither Hawk nor Pierrot would give way. They
were very obstinate. Both men wanted her. It was awkward.

"The Dove shall decide between us," smiled the Hawk politely, yet his
taloned fingers working nervously. Pierrot, however, more experienced
in the ways of dealing with women, or more bold, said suavely:

"I am ready to abide by her decision"--his voice poorly cloaked this
aggravating authority, as though he had the right to her--"only I
engaged this dance before his Majesty Horus appeared upon the scene at
all, and therefore it is clear that Pierrot has the right of way."

At once, with a masterful air, he took her off. There was no
withstanding him. He meant to have her and he got her. She yielded
meekly. They vanished among the maze of coloured dancers, leaving the
Hawk, disconsolate and vanquished, amid the titters of the onlookers.
His swiftness, as against this steady power, was of no avail.

It was then that the singular phenomenon was witnessed first. Those
who saw it affirm that he changed absolutely into the part he played.
It was dreadful; it was wicked. A frightened whisper ran about the
rooms and corridors:

"An extraordinary thing is in the air!"

Some shrank away, while others flocked to see. There were those who
swore that a curious, rushing sound was audible, the atmosphere visibly
disturbed and shaken; that a shadow fell upon the spot the couple had
vacated; that a cry was heard, a high, wild, searching cry: "Horus!
bright deity of wind," it began, then died away. One man was positive
that the windows had been opened and that something had flown in.
It was the obvious explanation. The thing spread horribly. As in a
fire-panic, there was consternation and excitement. Confusion caught
the feet of all the dancers. The music fumbled and lost time. The
leading pair of tango dancers halted and looked round. It seemed that
everybody pressed back, hiding, shuffling, eager to see, yet more eager
not to be seen, as though something dangerous, hostile, terrible, had
broken loose. In rows against the wall they stood. For a great space
had made itself in the middle of the ball-room, and into this empty
space appeared suddenly the Pierrot and the Dove.

It was like a challenge. A sound of applause, half voices, half
clapping of gloved hands, was heard. The couple danced exquisitely into
the arena. All stared. There was an impression that a set piece had
been prepared, and that this was its beginning. The music again took
heart. Pierrot was strong and dignified, no whit nonplussed by this
abrupt publicity. The Dove, though faltering, was deliciously obedient.
They danced together like a single outline. She was captured utterly.
And to the man who needed her the sight was naturally agonizing--the
protective way the Pierrot held her, the right and strength of it, the
mastery, the complete possession.

"He's got her!" some one breathed too loud, uttering the thought of
all. "Good thing it's not the Hawk!"

And, to the absolute amazement of the throng, this sight was then
apparent. A figure dropped through space. That high, shrill cry again
was heard:

"Feather my soul ... to know thy awful swiftness!"

Its singing loveliness touched the heart, its appealing, passionate
sweetness was marvellous, as from the gallery this figure of a man,
dressed as a strong, dark bird, shot down with splendid grace and ease.
The feathers swept; the swings spread out as sails that take the wind.
Like a hawk that darts with unerring power and aim upon its prey, this
thing of mighty wings rushed down into the empty space where the two
danced. Observed by all, he entered, swooping beautifully, stretching
his wings like any eagle. He dropped. He fixed his point of landing
with consummate skill close beside the astonished dancers. He landed.

It happened with such swiftness it brought the dazzle and blindness
as when lightning strikes. People in different parts of the room saw
different details; a few saw nothing at all after the first startling
shock, closing their eyes, or holding their arms before their faces as
in self-protection. The touch of panic fear caught the entire room. The
nameless thing that all the evening had been vaguely felt was come. It
had suddenly materialised.

For this incredible thing occurred in the full blaze of light upon
the open floor. Binovitch, grown in some sense formidable, opened his
dark, big wings about the girl. The long grey feathers moved, causing
powerful draughts of wind that made a rushing sound. An aspect of the
terrible was about him, like an emanation. The great beaked head was
poised to strike, the tufted claws were raised like fingers that shut
and opened, and the whole presentment of his amazing figure focused in
an attitude of attack that was magnificent and terrible. No one who saw
it doubted. Yet there were those who swore that it was not Binovitch
at all, but that another outline, monstrous and shadowy, towered
above him, draping his lesser proportions with two colossal wings of
darkness. That some touch of strange divinity lay in it may be claimed,
however confused the wild descriptions afterward. For many lowered
their heads and bowed their shoulders. There was terror. There was also
awe. The onlookers swayed as though some power passed over them through
the air.

A sound of wings was certainly in the room.

Then some one screamed; a shriek broke high and clear; and emotion,
ordinary human emotion, unaccustomed to terrific things, swept loose.
The Hawk and Vera flew. Beaten back against the wall as by a stroke
of whirlwind, the Pierrot staggered. He watched them go. Out of the
lighted room they flew, out of the crowded human atmosphere, out of
the heat and artificial light, the walled-in, airless halls that were
a cage. All this they left behind. They seemed things of wind and air,
made free happily of another element. Earth held them not. Toward the
open night they raced with this extraordinary lightness as of birds,
down the long corridor and on to the southern terrace, where great
coloured curtains were hung suspended from the columns. A moment they
were visible. Then the fringe of one huge curtain, lifted by the wind,
showed their dark outline for a second against the starry sky. There
was a cry, a leap. The curtain flapped again and closed. They vanished.
And into the ball-room swept the cold draught of night air from the
desert.

But three figures instantly were close upon their heels. The throng
of half-dazed, half-stupefied onlookers, it seemed, projected them as
though by some explosive force. The general mass held back, but, like
projectiles, these three flung themselves after the fugitives down the
corridor at high speed--the Apache, Don Quixote, and, last of them,
the Pierrot. For Khilkoff, the brother, and Baron Minski, the man who
caught wolves alive, had been for some time keenly on the watch, while
Dr. Plitzinger, reading the symptoms clearly, never far away, had been
faithfully observant of every movement. His mask tossed aside, the
great psychiatrist was now recognised by all. They reached the parapet
just as the curtain flapped back heavily into place; the next second
all three were out of sight behind it. Khilkoff was first, however,
urged forward at frantic speed by the warning words the doctor had
whispered as they ran. Some thirty yards beyond the terrace was the
brink of the crumbling cliff on which the great hotel was built, and
there was a drop of sixty feet to the desert floor below. Only a low
stone wall marked the edge.

Accounts varied. Khilkoff, it seems, arrived in time--in the nick of
time--to seize his sister, virtually hovering on the brink. He heard
the loose stones strike the sand below. There was no struggle, though
it appears she did not thank him for his interference at first. In a
sense she was beside--outside--herself. And he did a characteristic
thing: he not only brought her back into the ball-room, but he
_danced_ her back. It was admirable. Nothing could have calmed the
general excitement better. The pair of them danced in together as
though nothing was amiss. Accustomed to the strenuous practice of his
Cossack regiment, this young cavalry officer's muscles were equal to
the semi-dead weight in his arms. At most the onlookers thought her
tired, perhaps. Confidence was restored--such is the psychology of
a crowd--and in the middle of a thrilling Viennese waltz he easily
smuggled her out of the room, administered brandy, and got her up to
bed. The absence of the Hawk, meanwhile, was hardly noticed; comments
were made and then forgotten; it was Vera in whom the strange, anxious
sympathy had centred. And, with her obvious safety, the moment of
primitive, childish panic passed away. Don Quixote, too, was presently
seen dancing gaily as though nothing untoward had happened; supper
intervened; the incident was over; it had melted into the general
wildness of the evening's irresponsibility. The fact that Pierrot did
not appear again was noticed by no single person.

But Dr. Plitzinger was otherwise engaged, his heart and mind and
soul all deeply exercised. A death-certificate is not always made
out quite so simply as the public thinks. That Binovitch had died of
suffocation in his swift descent through merely sixty feet of air
was not conceivable; yet that his body lay so neatly placed upon the
desert after such a fall was stranger still. It was not crumpled, it
was not torn; no single bone was broken, no muscle wrenched; there was
no bruise. There was no indenture in the sand. The figure lay sidewise
as though in sleep, no sign of violence visible anywhere, the dark
wings folded as a great bird folds them when it creeps away to die in
loneliness. Beneath the Horus mask the face was smiling. It seemed
he had floated into death upon the element he loved. And only Vera
had seen the enormous wings that, hovering invitingly above the dark
abyss, bore him so softly into another world. Plitzinger, that is,
saw them, too, but he said firmly that they belonged to the big black
falcons that haunt the Mokattam Hills and roost upon these ridges,
close beside the hotel, at night. Both he and Vera, however, agreed
on one thing: the high, sharp cry in the air above them, wild and
plaintive, was certainly the black kite's cry--the note of the falcon
that passionately seeks its mate. It was the pause of a second, when
she stood to listen, that made her rescue possible. A moment later and
she, too, would have flown to death with Binovitch.




IV

INITIATION


A few years ago, on a Black Sea steamer heading for the Caucasus, I
fell into conversation with an American. He mentioned that he was on
his way to the Baku oilfields, and I replied that I was going up into
the mountains. He looked at me questioningly a moment. "Your first
trip?" he asked with interest. I said it was. A conversation followed;
it was continued the next day, and renewed the following day, until we
parted company at Batoum. I don't know why he talked so freely to me in
particular. Normally, he was a taciturn, silent man. We had been fellow
travellers from Marseilles, but after Constantinople we had the boat
pretty much to ourselves. What struck me about him was his vehement,
almost passionate, love of natural beauty--in seas and woods and sky,
but above all in mountains. It was like a religion in him. His taciturn
manner hid deep poetic feeling.

And he told me it had not always been so with him. A kind of friendship
sprang up between us. He was a New York business man--buying and
selling exchange between banks--but was English born. He had gone out
thirty years before, and become naturalised. His talk was exceedingly
"American," slangy, and almost Western. He said he had roughed it in
the West for a year or two first. But what he chiefly talked about was
mountains. He said it was in the mountains an unusual experience had
come to him that had opened his eyes to many things, but principally to
the beauty that was now everything to him, and to the--insignificance
of death.

He knew the Caucasus well where I was going. I think that was why he
was interested in me and my journey. "Up there," he said, "you'll feel
things--and maybe find out things you never knew before."

"What kind of things?" I asked.

"Why, for one," he replied with emotion and enthusiasm in his voice,
"that living and dying ain't either of them of much account. That if
you know Beauty, I mean, and Beauty is in your life, you live on in it
and with it for others--even when you're dead."

The conversation that followed is too long to give here, but it led to
his telling me the experience in his own life that had opened his eyes
to the truth of what he said. "Beauty is imperishable," he declared,
"and if you live with it, why, you're imperishable too!"

The story, as he told it verbally in his curious language, remains
vividly in my memory. But he had written it down, too, he said. And he
gave me the written account, with the remark that I was free to hand it
on to others if I "felt that way." He called it "Initiation." It runs
as follows.


1

In my own family this happened, for Arthur was my nephew. And a remote
Alpine valley was the place. It didn't seem to me in the least suitable
for such occurrences, except that it was Catholic, and the "Church," I
understand--at least, scholars who ought to know have told me so--has
subtle Pagan origins incorporated unwittingly in its observations of
certain Saints' Days, as well as in certain ceremonials. All this
kind of thing is Dutch to me, a form of poetry or superstition, for
I am interested chiefly in the buying and selling of exchange, with
an office in New York City, just off Wall Street, and only come to
Europe now occasionally for a holiday. I like to see the dear old musty
cities, and go to the Opera, and take a motor run through Shakespeare's
country or round the Lakes, get in touch again with London and Paris
at the Ritz Hotels--and then back again to the greatest city on earth,
where for years now I've been making a good thing out of it. Repton
and Cambridge, long since forgotten, had their uses. They were all
right enough at the time. But I'm now "on the make," with a good fat
partnership, and have left all that truck behind me.

My half-brother, however--he was my senior and got the cream of the
family wholesale chemical works--has stuck to the trade in the Old
Country, and is making probably as much as I am. He approved my taking
the chance that offered, and is only sore now because his son, Arthur,
is on the stupid side. He agreed that finance suited my temperament far
better than drugs and chemicals, though he warned me that all American
finance was speculative and therefore dangerous. "Arthur is getting
on," he said in his last letter, "and will some day take the director's
place you would be in now had you cared to stay. But he's a plodder,
rather." That meant, I knew, that Arthur was a fool. Business, at any
rate, was not suited to his temperament. Five years ago, when I came
home with a month's holiday to be used in working up connections in
English banking circles, I saw the boy. He was fifteen years of age at
the time, a delicate youth, with an artist's dreams in his big blue
eyes, if my memory goes for anything, but with a tangle of yellow hair
and features of classical beauty that would have made half the young
girls of my New York set in love with him, and a choice of heiresses at
his disposal when he wanted them.

I have a clear recollection of my nephew then. He struck me as
having grit and character, but as being wrongly placed. He had his
grandfather's tastes. He ought to have been, like him, a great scholar,
a poet, an editor of marvellous old writings in new editions. I
couldn't get much out of the boy, except that he "liked the chemical
business fairly," and meant to please his father by "knowing it
thoroughly" so as to qualify later for his directorship. But I have
never forgotten the evening when I caught him in the hall, staring up
at his grandfather's picture, with a kind of light about his face, and
the big blue eyes all rapt and tender (almost as if he had been crying)
and replying, when I asked him what was up: "_That_ was worth living
for. He brought Beauty back into the world!"

"Yes," I said, "I guess that's right enough. He did. But there was no
money in it to speak of."

The boy looked at me and smiled. He twigged somehow or other that deep
down in me, somewhere below the money-making instinct, a poet, but a
dumb poet, lay in hiding. "You know what I mean," he said. "It's in you
too."

The picture was a copy--my father had it made--of the presentation
portrait given to Baliol, and "the grandfather" was celebrated in his
day for the translations he made of Anacreon and Sappho, of Homer, too,
if I remember rightly, as well as for a number of classical studies
and essays that he wrote. A lot of stuff like that he did, and made a
name at it too. His _Lives of the Gods_ went into six editions. They
said--the big critics of his day--that he was "a poet who wrote no
poetry, yet lived it passionately in the spirit of old-world, classical
Beauty," and I know he was a wonderful fellow in his way and made the
dons and schoolmasters all sit up. We're proud of him all right. After
twenty-five years of successful "exchange" in New York City, I confess
I am unable to appreciate all that, feeling more in touch with the
commercial and financial spirit of the age, progress, development and
the rest. But, still, I'm not ashamed of the classical old boy, who
seems to have been a good deal of a Pagan, judging by the records we
have kept. However, Arthur peering up at that picture in the dusk, his
eyes half moist with emotion, and his voice gone positively shaky, is a
thing I never have forgotten. He stimulated my curiosity uncommonly. It
stirred something deep down in me that I hardly cared to acknowledge on
Wall Street--something burning.

And the next time I saw him was in the summer of 1910, when I came
to Europe for a two months' look around--my wife at Newport with the
children--and hearing that he was in Switzerland, learning a bit of
French to help him in the business, I made a point of dropping in upon
him just to see how he was shaping generally and what new kinks his
mind had taken on. There was something in Arthur I never could quite
forget. Whenever his face came into my mind I began to think. A kind of
longing came over me--a desire for Beauty, I guess, it was. It made me
dream.

I found him at an English tutor's--a lively old dog, with a fondness
for the cheap native wines, and a financial interest in the tourist
development of the village. The boys learnt French in the mornings,
possibly, but for the rest of the day were free to amuse themselves
exactly as they pleased and without a trace of supervision--provided
the parents footed the bills without demur.

This suited everybody all round; and as long as the boys came home with
an accent and a vocabulary, all was well. For myself, having learned
in New York to attend strictly to my own business--exchange between
different countries with a profit--I did not deem it necessary to
exchange letters and opinions with my brother--with no chance of profit
anywhere. But I got to know Arthur, and had a queer experience of my
own into the bargain. Oh, there was profit in it for me. I'm drawing
big dividends to this day on the investment.

I put up at the best hotel in the village, a one-horse show, differing
from the other inns only in the prices charged for a lot of cheap
decoration in the dining-room, and went up to surprise my nephew with
a call the first thing after dinner. The tutor's house stood some way
back from the narrow street, among fields where there were more flowers
than grass, and backed by a forest of fine old timber that stretched
up several thousand feet to the snow. The snow at least was visible,
peeping out far overhead just where the dark line of forest stopped;
but in reality, I suppose, that was an effect of foreshortening,
and whole valleys and pastures intervened between the trees and the
snow-fields. The sunset, long since out of the valley, still shone
on those white ridges, where the peaks stuck up like the teeth of a
gigantic saw. I guess it meant five or six hours' good climbing to get
up to them--and nothing to do when you got there. Switzerland, anyway,
seemed a poor country, with its little bit of watch-making, sour wines,
and every square yard hanging upstairs at an angle of 60 degrees used
for hay. Picture postcards, chocolate and cheap tourists kept it going
apparently, but I dare say it was all right enough to learn French
in--and cheap as Hoboken to live in!

Arthur was out; I just left a card and wrote on it that I would be very
pleased if he cared to step down to take luncheon with me at my hotel
next day. Having nothing better to do, I strolled homewards by way of
the forest.

Now what came over me in that bit of dark pine forest is more than I
can quite explain, but I think it must have been due to the height--the
village was 4,000 feet above sea-level--and the effect of the rarefied
air upon my circulation. The nearest thing to it in my experience is
rye whisky, the queer touch of wildness, of self-confidence, a kind
of whooping rapture and the reckless sensation of being a tin god of
sorts that comes from a lot of alcohol--a memory, please understand,
of years before, when I thought it a grand thing to own the earth and
paint the old town red. I seemed to walk on air, and there was a smell
about those trees that made me suddenly--well, that took my mind clean
out of its accustomed rut. It was just too lovely and wonderful for me
to describe it. I had got well into the forest and lost my way a bit.
The smell of an old-world garden wasn't in it. It smelt to me as if
some one had just that minute turned out the earth all fresh and new.
There was moss and tannin, a hint of burning, something between smoke
and incense, say, and a fine clean odour of pitch-pine bark when the
sun gets on it after rain--and a flavour of the sea thrown in for luck.
That was the first I noticed, for I had never smelt anything half so
good since my camping days on the coast of Maine. And I stood still to
enjoy it. I threw away my cigar for fear of mixing things and spoiling
it. "If that could be bottled," I said to myself, "it'd sell for two
dollars a pint in every city in the Union!"

And it was just then, while standing and breathing it in, that I got
the queer feeling of some one watching me. I kept quite still. Some one
was moving near me. The sweat went trickling down my back. A kind of
childhood thrill got hold of me.

It was very dark. I was not afraid exactly, but I was a stranger in
these parts and knew nothing about the habits of the mountain peasants.
There might be tough customers lurking around after dark on the chance
of striking some guy of a tourist with money in his pockets. Yet,
somehow, that wasn't the kind of feeling that came to me at all, for,
though I had a pocket Browning at my hip, the notion of getting at it
did not even occur to me. The sensation was new--a kind of lifting,
exciting sensation that made my heart swell out with exhilaration.
There was happiness in it. A cloud that _weighed_ seemed to roll off my
mind, same as that light-hearted mood when the office door is locked
and I'm off on a two months' holiday--with gaiety and irresponsibility
at the back of it. It was invigorating. I felt youth sweep over me.

I stood there, wondering what on earth was coming on me, and half
expecting that any moment some one would come out of the darkness and
show himself; and as I held my breath and made no movement at all the
queer sensation grew stronger. I believe I even resisted a temptation
to kick up my heels and dance, to let out a flying shout as a man
with liquor in him does. Instead of this, however, I just kept dead
still. The wood was black as ink all round me, too black to see the
tree-trunks separately, except far below where the village lights came
up twinkling between them, and the only way I kept the path was by the
soft feel of the pine-needles that were thicker than a Brussels carpet.
But nothing happened, and no one stirred. The idea that I was being
watched remained, only there was no sound anywhere except the roar of
falling water that filled the entire valley. Yet some one was very
close to me in the darkness.

I can't say how long I might have stood there, but I guess it was the
best part of ten minutes, and I remember it struck me that I had run
up against a pocket of extra-rarefied air that had a lot of oxygen in
it--oxygen or something similar--and that was the cause of my elation.
The idea was nonsense, I have no doubt; but for the moment it half
explained the thing to me. I realised it was all _natural_ enough, at
any rate--and so moved on. It took a longish time to reach the edge
of the wood, and a footpath led me--oh, it was quite a walk, I tell
you--into the village street again. I was both glad and sorry to get
there. I kept myself busy thinking the whole thing over again. What
caught me all of a heap was that million-dollar sense of beauty, youth,
and happiness. Never in my born days had I felt anything to touch it.
And it hadn't cost a cent!

Well, I was sitting there enjoying my smoke and trying to puzzle it
all out, and the hall was pretty full of people smoking and talking
and reading papers, and so forth, when all of a sudden I looked up and
caught my breath with such a jerk that I actually bit my tongue. There
was grandfather in front of my chair! I looked into his eyes. I saw him
as clear and solid as the porter standing behind his desk across the
lounge, and it gave me a touch of cold all down the back that I needn't
forget unless I want to. He was looking into my face, and he had a cap
in his hand, and he was speaking to me. It was my grandfather's picture
come to life, only much thinner and younger and a kind of light in his
eyes like fire.

"I beg your pardon, but you _are_--Uncle Jim, aren't you?"

And then, with another jump of my nerves, I understood.

"You, Arthur! Well, I'm jiggered. So it is. Take a chair, boy. I'm
right glad you found me. Shake! Sit down." And I shook his hand and
pushed a chair up for him. I was never so surprised in my life. The
last time I set eyes on him he was a boy. Now he was a young man, and
the very image of his ancestor.

He sat down, fingering his cap. He wouldn't have a drink and he
wouldn't smoke. "All right," I said, "let's talk then. I've lots to
tell you and I've lots to hear. How are you, boy?"

He didn't answer at first. He eyed me up and down. He hesitated. He was
as handsome as a young Greek god.

"I say, Uncle Jim," he began presently, "it _was_ you--just now--in the
wood--wasn't it?" It made me start, that question put so quietly.

"I _have_ just come through that wood up there," I answered, pointing
in the direction as well as I could remember, "if that's what you mean.
But why? _You_ weren't there, were you?" It gave me a queer sort of
feeling to hear him say it. What in the name of heaven did he mean?

He sat back in his chair with a sigh of relief.

"Oh, that's all right then," he said, "if it _was_ you. Did you see,"
he asked suddenly; "did you see--anything?"

"Not a thing," I told him honestly. "It was far too dark." I laughed.
I fancied I twigged his meaning. But I was not the sort of uncle to
come prying on him. Life must be dull enough, I remembered, in this
mountain village.

But he didn't understand my laugh. He didn't mean what I meant.

And there came a pause between us. I discovered that we were talking
different lingoes. I leaned over towards him.

"Look here, Arthur," I said in a lower voice, "what is it, and what do
you mean? I'm all right, you know, and you needn't be afraid of telling
me. What d'you mean by--did I see anything?"

We looked each other squarely in the eye. He saw he could trust me, and
I saw--well, a whole lot of things, perhaps, but I felt chiefly that he
liked me and would tell me things later, all in his own good time. I
liked him all the better for that too.

"I only meant," he answered slowly, "whether you really
_saw_--anything?"

"No," I said straight, "I didn't see a thing, but, by the gods, I
_felt_ something."

He started. I started too. An astonishing big look came swimming over
his fair, handsome face. His eyes seemed all lit up. He looked as if
he'd just made a cool million in wheat or cotton.

"I knew--you were that sort," he whispered. "Though I hardly remembered
what you looked like."

"Then what on earth was it?" I asked.

His reply staggered me a bit. "It was just that," he said--"the Earth!"

And then, just when things were getting interesting and promising a
dividend, he shut up like a clam. He wouldn't say another word. He
asked after my family and business, my health, what kind of crossing
I'd had, and all the rest of the common stock. It fairly bowled me
over. And I couldn't change him either.

I suppose in America we get pretty free and easy, and don't quite
understand reserve. But this young man of half my age kept me in my
place as easily as I might have kept a nervous customer quiet in my
own office. He just refused to take me on. He was polite and cool and
distant as you please, and when I got pressing sometimes he simply
pretended he didn't understand. I could no more get him back again to
the subject of the wood than a customer could have gotten me to tell
him about the prospects of exchange being cheap or dear--when I didn't
know myself but wouldn't let him see I didn't know. He was charming, he
was delightful, enthusiastic and even affectionate; downright glad to
see me, too, and to chin with me--but I couldn't draw him worth a cent.
And in the end I gave up trying.

And the moment I gave up trying he let down a little--but only a very
little.

"You'll stay here some time, Uncle Jim, won't you?"

"That's my idea," I said, "if I can see you, and you can show me round
some."

He laughed with pleasure. "Oh, rather. I've got lots of time. After
three in the afternoon I'm free till--any time you like. There's a lot
to see," he added.

"Come along to-morrow then," I said. "If you can't take lunch, perhaps
you can come just afterwards. You'll find me waiting for you--right
here."

"I'll come at three," he replied, and we said good-night.


2

He turned up sharp at three, and I liked his punctuality. I saw him
come swinging down the dusty road; tall, deep-chested, his broad
shoulders a trifle high, and his head set proudly. He looked like a
young chap in training, a thoroughbred, every inch of him. At the same
time there was a touch of something a little too refined and delicate
for a man, I thought. That was the poetic, scholarly vein in him, I
guess--grandfather cropping out. This time he wore no cap. His thick
light hair, not brushed back like the London shop-boys, but parted on
the side, yet untidy for all that, suited him exactly and gave him a
touch of wildness.

"Well," he asked, "what would you like to do, Uncle Jim? I'm at your
service, and I've got the whole afternoon till supper at seven-thirty."
I told him I'd like to go through that wood. "All right," he said,
"come along. I'll show you." He gave me one quick glance, but said no
more. "I'd like to see if I feel anything this time," I explained.
"We'll locate the very spot, maybe." He nodded.

"You know where I mean, don't you?" I asked, "because you saw me
there?" He just said yes, and then we started.

It was hot, and air was scarce. I remember that we went uphill,
and that I realised there was considerable difference in our ages.
We crossed some fields first--smothered in flowers so thick that I
wondered how much grass the cows got out of it!--and then came to a
sprinkling of fine young larches that looked as soft as velvet. There
was no path, just a wild mountain side. I had very little breath on
the steep zigzags, but Arthur talked easily--and talked mighty well,
too: the light and shade, the colouring, and the effect of all this
wilderness of lonely beauty on the mind. He kept all this suppressed
at home in business. It was safety valves. I twigged _that_. It was
the artist in him talking. He seemed to think there was nothing in the
world but Beauty--with a big B all the time. And the odd thing was he
took for granted that I felt the same. It was cute of him to flatter
me that way. "Daulis and the lone Cephissian vale," I heard; and a few
moments later--with a sort of reverence in his voice like worship--he
called out a great singing name: "_Astarte!_"

  "Day is her face, and midnight is her hair,
   And morning hours are but the golden stair
   By which she climbs to Night."

It was here first that a queer change began to grow upon me too.

"Steady on, boy! I've forgotten all my classics ages ago," I cried.

He turned and gazed down on me, his big eyes glowing, and not a sign of
perspiration on his skin.

"That's nothing," he exclaimed in his musical, deep voice. "You know
it, or you'd never have felt things in this wood last night; and you
wouldn't have wanted to come out with me _now_!"

"How?" I gasped. "How's that?"

"You've come," he continued quietly, "to the only valley in
this artificial country that has atmosphere. This valley is
_alive_--especially this end of it. There's superstition here, thank
God! Even the peasants know things."

I stared at him. "See here, Arthur," I objected. "I'm not a Cath. And I
don't know a thing--at least it's all dead in me and forgotten--about
poetry or classics or your gods and pan--pantheism--in spite of
grandfather----"

His face turned like a dream face.

"Hush!" he said quickly. "Don't mention _him_. There's a bit of him in
you as well as in me, and it was here, you know, he wrote----"

I didn't hear the rest of what he said. A creep came over me. I
remembered that this ancestor of ours lived for years in the isolation
of some Swiss forest where he claimed--he used that setting for his
writing--he had found the exiled gods, their ghosts, their beauty,
their eternal essences--or something astonishing of that sort. I had
clean forgotten it till this moment. It all rushed back upon me, a
memory of my boyhood.

And, as I say, a creep came over me--something as near to awe as
ever could be. The sunshine on that field of yellow daisies and blue
forget-me-nots turned pale. That warm valley wind had a touch of snow
in it. And, ashamed and frightened of my baby mood, I looked at Arthur,
meaning to choke him off with all this rubbish--and then saw something
in his eyes that scared me stiff.

I admit it. What's the use? There was an expression on his fine big
face that made my blood go curdled. I got cold feet right there. It
mastered me. In him, behind him, near him--blest if I know which,
_through_ him probably--came an enormous thing that turned me
insignificant. It downed me utterly.

It was over in a second, the flash of a wing. I recovered instantly. No
mere boy should come these muzzy tricks on me, scholar or no scholar.
For the change in me was on the increase, and I shrank.

"See here, Arthur," I said plainly once again, "I don't know what your
game is, but--there's something queer up here I don't quite get at. I'm
only a business man, with classics and poetry all gone dry in me twenty
years ago and more----"

He looked at me so strangely that I stopped, confused.

"But, Uncle Jim," he said as quietly as though we talked tobacco
brands, "you needn't be alarmed. It's natural you should feel the
place. You and I belong to it. We've both got _him_ in us. You're just
as proud of him as I am, only in a different way." And then he added,
with a touch of disappointment: "I thought you'd like it. You weren't
afraid last night. You felt the beauty _then_."

Flattery is a darned subtle thing at any time. To see him standing
over me in that superior way and talking down at my poor business
mind--well, it just came over me that I was laying my cards on the
table a bit too early. After so many years of city life----!

Anyway, I pulled myself together. "I was only kidding you, boy," I
laughed. "I feel this beauty just as much as you do. Only, I guess,
you're more accustomed to it than I am. Come on now," I added with
energy, getting upon my feet, "let's push on and see the wood. I want
to find that place again."

He pulled me with a hand of iron, laughing as he did so. Gee! I wished
I had his teeth, as well as the muscles in his arm. Yet I felt younger,
somehow, too--youth flowed more and more into my veins. I had forgotten
how sweet the winds and woods and flowers could be. Something melted in
me. For it was Spring, and the whole world was singing like a dream.
Beauty was creeping over me. I don't know. I began to feel all big and
tender and open to a thousand wonderful sensations. The thought of
streets and houses seemed like death....

We went on again, not talking much; my breath got shorter and shorter,
and he kept looking about him as though he expected something. But we
passed no living soul, not even a peasant; there were no chalets, no
cattle, no cattle shelters even. And then I realised that the valley
lay at our feet in haze and that we had been climbing at least a
couple of hours. "Why, last night I got home in twenty minutes at the
outside," I said. He shook his head, smiling. "It seemed like that," he
replied, "but you really took much longer. It was long after ten when I
found you in the hall." I reflected a moment. "Now I come to think of
it, you're right, Arthur. Seems curious, though, somehow." He looked
closely at me. "I followed you all the way," he said.

"You followed me!"

"And you went at a good pace too. It was your feelings that made it
seem so short--you were singing to yourself and happy as a dancing
faun. We kept close behind you for a long way."

I think it was "we" he said, but for some reason or other I didn't care
to ask.

"Maybe," I answered shortly, trying uncomfortably to recall what
particular capers I had cut. "I guess that's right." And then I added
something about the loneliness, and how deserted all this slope of
mountain was. And he explained that the peasants were afraid of it and
called it No Man's Land. From one year's end to another no human foot
went up or down it; the hay was never cut; no cattle grazed along the
splendid pastures; no chalet had even been built within a mile of the
wood we slowly made for. "They're superstitious," he told me. "It was
just the same a hundred years ago when _he_ discovered it--there was a
little natural cave on the edge of the forest where he used to sleep
sometimes--I'll show it to you presently--but for generations this
entire mountain-side has been undisturbed. You'll never meet a living
soul in any part of it." He stopped and pointed above us to where the
pine wood hung in mid-air, like a dim blue carpet. "It's just the place
for Them, you see."

And a thrill of power went smashing through me. I can't describe
it. It drenched me like a waterfall. I thought of Greece--Mount Ida
and a thousand songs! Something in me--it was like the click of a
shutter--announced that the "change" was suddenly complete. I was
another man; or rather a deeper part of me took command. My very
language showed it.

The calm of halcyon weather lay over all. Overhead the peaks rose clear
as crystal; below us the village lay in a bluish smudge of smoke and
haze, as though a great finger had rubbed them softly into the earth.
Absolute loneliness fell upon me like a clap. From the world of human
beings we seemed quite shut off. And there began to steal over me again
the strange elation of the night before.... We found ourselves almost
at once against the edge of the wood.

It rose in front of us, a big wall of splendid trees, motionless as if
cut out of dark green metal, the branches hanging stiff, and the crowd
of trunks lost in the blue dimness underneath. I shaded my eyes with
one hand, trying to peer into the solemn gloom. The contrast between
the brilliant sunshine on the pastures and this region of heavy shadows
blurred my sight.

"It's like the entrance to another world," I whispered.

"It is," said Arthur, watching me. "We will go in. You shall pluck
asphodel...."

And, before I knew it, he had me by the hand. We were advancing. We
left the light behind us. The cool air dropped upon me like a sheet.
There was a temple silence. The sun ran down behind the sky, leaving a
marvellous blue radiance everywhere. Nothing stirred. But through the
stillness there rose power, power that has no name, power that hides at
the foundations somewhere--foundations that are changeless, invisible,
everlasting. What do I mean? My mind grew to the dimensions of a
planet. We were among the roots of life--whence issues that _one thing_
in infinite guise that seeks so many temporary names from the protean
minds of men.

"You shall pluck asphodel in the meadows this side of Erebus," Arthur
was chanting. "Hermes himself, the Psychopomp, shall lead, and Malahide
shall welcome us."

Malahide...!

To hear him use that name, the name of our scholar-ancestor, now dead
and buried close upon a century--the way he half chanted it--gave me
the goose-flesh. I stopped against a tree-stem, thinking of escape. No
words came to me at the moment, for I didn't know what to say; but, on
turning to find the bright green slopes just left behind, I saw only
a crowd of trees and shadows hanging thick as a curtain--as though we
had walked a mile. And it was a shock. The way out was lost. The trees
closed up behind us like a tide.

"It's all right," said Arthur; "just keep an open mind and a heart
alive with love. It has a shattering effect at first, but that will
pass." He saw I was afraid, for I shrank visibly enough. He stood
beside me in his grey flannel suit, with his brilliant eyes and his
great shock of hair, looking more like a column of light than a human
being. "It's all quite right and natural," he repeated; "we have passed
the gateway, and Hecate, who presides over gateways, will let us out
again. Do not make discord by feeling fear. This is a pine wood, and
pines are the oldest, simplest trees; they are true primitives. They
are an open channel; and in a pine wood where no human life has ever
been you shall often find gateways where Hecate is kind to such as us."

He took my hand--he must have felt mine trembling, but his own was
cool and strong and felt like silver--and led me forward into the
depths of a wood that seemed to me quite endless. It felt endless,
that is to say. I don't know what came over me. Fear slipped away, and
elation took its place.... As we advanced over ground that seemed
level, or slightly undulating, I saw bright pools of sunshine here
and there upon the forest floor. Great shafts of light dropped in
slantingly between the trunks. There was movement everywhere, though I
never could see what moved. A delicious, scented air stirred through
the lower branches. Running water sang not very far away. Figures
I did not actually see; yet there were limbs and flowing draperies
and flying hair from time to time, ever just beyond the pools of
sunlight.... Surprise went from me too. I was on air. The atmosphere
of dream came round me, but a dream of something just hovering outside
the world I knew--a dream wrought in gold and silver, with shining
eyes, with graceful beckoning hands, and with voices that rang like
bells of music.... And the pools of light grew larger, merging one
into another, until a delicate soft light shone equably throughout
the entire forest. Into this zone of light we passed together. Then
something fell abruptly at our feet, as though thrown down ... two
marvellous, shining sprays of blossom such as I had never seen in all
my days before!

"Asphodel!" cried my companion, stooping to pick them up and handing
one to me. I took it from him with a delight I could not understand.
"Keep it," he murmured; "it is the sign that we are welcome. For
Malahide has dropped these on our path."

And at the use of that ancestral name it seemed that a spirit passed
before my face and the hair of my head stood up. There was a sense
of violent, unhappy contrast. A composite picture presented itself,
then rushed away. What was it? My youth in England, music and poetry
at Cambridge and my passionate love of Greek that lasted two terms at
most, when Malahide's great books formed part of the curriculum. Over
against this, then, the drag and smother of solid worldly business,
the sordid weight of modern ugliness, the bitterness of an ambitious,
over-striving life. And abruptly--beyond both pictures--a shining,
marvellous Beauty that scattered stars beneath my feet and scarved
the universe with gold. All this flashed before me with the utterance
of that old family name. An alternative sprang up. There seemed some
radical, elemental choice presented to me--to what I used to call my
soul. My soul could take or leave it as it pleased....

I looked at Arthur moving beside me like a shaft of light. What had
come over me? How had our walk and talk and mood, our quite recent
everyday and ordinary view, our normal relationship with the things of
the world--how had it all slipped into this? So insensibly, so easily,
so naturally!

"Was it worth while?"

The question--_I_ didn't ask it--jumped up in me of its own accord.
Was "what" worth while? Why, my present life of commonplace and
grubbing toil, of course; my city existence, with its meagre,
unremunerative ambitions. Ah, it was this new Beauty calling me, this
shining dream that lay beyond the two pictures I have mentioned.... I
did not argue it, even to myself. But I understood. There was a radical
change in me. The buried poet, too long hidden, rushed into the air
like some great singing bird.

I glanced again at Arthur moving along lightly by my side, half
dancing almost in his brimming happiness. "Wait till you see Them,"
I heard him singing. "Wait till you hear the call of Artemis and the
footsteps of her flying nymphs. Wait till Orion thunders overhead and
Selene, crowned with the crescent moon, drives up the zenith in her
white-horsed chariot. The choice will be beyond all question then...!"

A great silent bird, with soft brown plumage, whirred across our path,
pausing an instant as though to peep, then disappearing with a muted
sound into an eddy of the wind it made. The big trees hid it. It was
an owl. The same moment I heard a rush of liquid song come pouring
through the forest with a gush of almost human notes, and a pair
of glossy wings flashed past us, swerving upwards to find the open
sky--blue-black, pointed wings.

"His favourites!" exclaimed my companion with clear joy in his voice.
"They all are here! Athene's bird, Procne and Philomela too! The
owl--the swallow--and the nightingale! Tereus and Itys are not far
away." And the entire forest, as he said it, stirred with movement,
as though that great bird's quiet wings had waked the sea of ancient
shadows. There were voices too--ringing, laughing voices, as though his
words woke echoes that had been listening for it. For I heard sweet
singing in the distance. The names he had used perplexed me. Yet even
I, stranger as I was to such refined delights, could not mistake the
passion of the nightingale and the dart of the eager swallow. That wild
burst of music, that curve of swift escape, were unmistakable.

And I struck a stalwart tree-stem with my open hand, feeling the need
of hearing, touching, sensing it. My link with known, remembered things
was breaking. I craved the satisfaction of the commonplace. I got that
satisfaction; but I got something more as well. For the trunk was
round and smooth and comely. It was no dead thing I struck. Somehow it
brushed me into intercourse with inanimate Nature. And next the desire
came to hear my voice--my own familiar, high-pitched voice with the
twang and accent the New World climate brings, so-called American:

"Exchange Place, Noo York City. I'm in that business, buying and
selling of exchange between the banks of two civilised countries, one
of them stoopid and old-fashioned, the other leading all creation...!"

It was an effort; but I made it firmly. It sounded odd, remote, unreal.

"Sunlit woods and a wind among the branches", followed close and sweet
upon my words. But who, in the name of Wall Street, said it?

"England's buying gold," I tried again. "We've had a private wire. Cut
in quick. First National is selling!"

Great-faced Hephæstus, how ridiculous! It was like saying, "I'll take
your scalp unless you give me meat." It was barbaric, savage, centuries
ago. Again there came another voice that caught up my own and turned it
into common syntax. Some heady beauty of the Earth rose about me like a
cloud.

"Hark! Night comes, with the dusk upon her eyelids. She brings those
dreams that every dew-drop holds at dawn. Daughter of Thanatos and
Hypnos...!"

But again--who said the words? It surely was not Arthur, my nephew
Arthur, of To-day, learning French in a Swiss mountain village! I
felt--well, what did I feel? In the name of the Stock Exchange and Wall
Street, what was the cash surrender of amazing feelings?


3

And, turning to look at him, I made a discovery. I don't know how to
tell it quite; such shadowy marvels have never been my line of goods.
He looked several things at once--taller, slighter, sweeter, but
chiefly--it sounds so crazy when I write it down--grander is the word,
I think. And all spread out with some power that flowed like Spring
when it pours upon a landscape. Eternally young and glorious--young,
I mean, in the sense of a field of flowers in the Spring looks young;
and glorious in the sense the sky looks glorious at dawn or sunset.
Something big shone through him like a storm, something that would
go on for ever just as the Earth goes on, always renewing itself,
something of gigantic life that in the human sense could never age at
all--something the old gods had. But the figure, so far as there was
any figure at all, was that old family picture come to life. Our great
ancestor and Arthur were one being, and that one being was vaster than
a million people. Yet it was Malahide I saw....

"They laid me in the earth I loved," he said in a strange, thrilling
voice like running wind and water, "and I found eternal life. I live
now for ever in Their divine existence. I share the life that changes
yet can never pass away."

I felt myself rising like a cloud as he said it. A roaring beauty
captured me completely. If I could tell it in honest newspaper
language--the common language used in flats and offices--why, I
guess I could patent a new meaning in ordinary words, a new power of
expression, the thing that all the churches and poets and thinkers have
been trying to say since the world began. I caught on to a fact so fine
and simple that it knocked me silly to think I'd never realised it
before. I had read it, yes; but now I _knew_ it. The Earth, the whole
bustling universe, was nothing after all but a visible production of
eternal, living Powers--spiritual powers, mind you--that just happened
to include the particular little type of strutting creature we called
mankind. And these Powers, as seen in Nature, were the gods. It was our
refusal of their grand appeal, so wild and sweet and beautiful, that
caused "evil." It was this barrier between ourselves and the rest of ...

My thoughts and feelings swept away upon the rising flood as the
"figure" came upon me like a shaft of moonlight, melting the last
remnant of opposition that was in me. I took my brain, my reason,
chucking them aside for the futile little mechanism I suddenly saw
them to be. In place of them came--oh, God, I hate to say it, for
only nursery talk can get within a mile of it, and yet what I need is
something simpler even than the words that children use. Under one arm
I carried a whole forest breathing in the wind, and beneath the other
a hundred meadows full of singing streams with golden marigolds and
blue forget-me-nots along their banks. Upon my back and shoulders lay
the clouded hills with dew and moonlight in their brimmed, capacious
hollows. Thick in my hair hung the unaging powers that are stars and
sunlight; though the sun was far away, it sweetened the currents of
my blood with liquid gold. Breast and throat and face, as I advanced,
met all the rivers of the world and all the winds of heaven, their
strength and swiftness melting into me as light melts into everything
it touches. And into my eyes passed all the radiant colours that weave
the cloth of Nature as she takes the sun.

And this "figure," pouring upon me like a burst of moonlight, spoke:

"They all are in you--air, and fire, and water...."

"And I--my feet stand--on the _Earth_," my own voice interrupted, deep
power lifting through the sound of it.

"The Earth!" He laughed gigantically. He spread. He seemed everywhere
about me. He seemed a race of men. My life swam forth in waves of some
immense sensation that issued from the mountain and the forest, then
returned to them again. I reeled. I clutched at something in me that
was slipping beyond control, slipping down a bank towards a deep, dark
river flowing at my feet. A shadowy boat appeared, a still more shadowy
outline at the helm. I was in the act of stepping into it. For the tree
I caught at was only air. I couldn't stop myself. I tried to scream.

"You have plucked asphodel," sang the voice beside me, "and you shall
pluck more...."

I slipped and slipped, the speed increasing horribly. Then something
caught, as though a cog held fast and stopped me. I remembered my
business in New York City.

"Arthur!" I yelled. "Arthur!" I shouted again as hard as I could shout.
There was frantic terror in me. I felt as though I should never get
back to myself again. Death!

The answer came in his normal voice: "Keep close to me. I know the
way...."

The scenery dwindled suddenly; the trees came back. I was walking in
the forest beside my nephew, and the moonlight lay in patches and
little shafts of silver. The crests of the pines just murmured in a
wind that scarcely stirred, and through an opening on our right I saw
the deep valley clasped about the twinkling village lights. Towering
in splendour the spectral snowfields hung upon the sky, huge summits
guarding them. And Arthur took my arm--oh, solidly enough this time.
Thank heaven, he asked no questions of me.

"There's a smell of myrrh," he whispered, "and we are very near the
undying, ancient things."

I said something about the resin from the trees, but he took no notice.

"It enclosed its body in an egg of myrrh," he went on, smiling down
at me; "then, setting it on fire, rose from the ashes with its life
renewed. Once every five hundred years, you see----"

"What did?" I cried, feeling that loss of self stealing over me again.
And his answer came like a blow between the eyes:

"The Phoenix. They called it a bird, but, of course, the true ..."

"But my life's insured in that," I cried, for he had named the company
that took large yearly premiums from me; "and I pay ..."

"Your life's insured in _this_," he said quietly, waving his arms to
indicate the Earth. "Your love of Nature and your sympathy with it make
you safe." He gazed at me. There was a marvellous expression in his
eyes. I understood why poets talked of stars and flowers in a human
face. But behind the face crept back another look as well. There grew
about his figure an indeterminate extension. The outline of Malahide
again stirred through his own. A pale, delicate hand reached out to
take my own. And something broke in me.

I was conscious of two things--a burst of joy that meant losing myself
entirely, and a rush of terror that meant staying as I was, a small,
painful, struggling item of individual life. Another spray of that
awful asphodel fell fluttering through the air in front of my face. It
rested on the earth against my feet. And Arthur--this weirdly changing
Arthur--stooped to pick it for me. I kicked it with my foot beyond his
reach ... then turned and ran as though the Furies of that ancient
world were after me. I ran for my very life. How I escaped from that
thick wood without banging my body to bits against the trees I can't
explain. I ran from something I desired and yet feared. I leaped along
in a succession of flying bounds. Each tree I passed turned of its
own accord and flung after me until the entire forest followed. But
I got out. I reached the open. Upon the sloping field in the full,
clear light of the moon I collapsed in a panting heap. The Earth drew
back with a great shuddering sigh behind me. There was this strange,
tumultuous sound upon the night. I lay beneath the open heavens that
were full of moonlight. I was myself--but there were tears in me.
Beauty too high for understanding had slipped between my fingers. I had
lost Malahide. I had lost the gods of Earth.... Yet I had seen ... and
felt. I had not lost all. Something remained that I could never lose
again....

I don't know how it happened exactly, but presently I heard Arthur
saying: "You'll catch your death of cold if you lie on that soaking
grass," and felt his hand seize mine to pull me to my feet.

"I feel safer on earth," I believe I answered. And then he said: "Yes,
but it's such a stupid way to die--a chill!"


4

I got up then, and we went downhill together towards the village
lights. I danced--oh, I admit it--I sang as well. There was a flood
of joy and power about me that beat anything I'd ever felt before. I
didn't think or hesitate; there was no self-consciousness; I just let
it rip for all there was, and if there had been ten thousand people
there in front of me, I could have made them feel it too. That was the
kind of feeling--power and confidence and a sort of raging happiness.
I think I know what it was too. I say this soberly, with reverence ...
all wool and no fading. There was a bit of God in me, God's power that
drives the Earth and pours through Nature--the imperishable Beauty
expressed in those old-world nature-deities!

And the fear I'd felt was nothing but the little tickling point
of losing my ordinary two-cent self, the dread of letting go, the
shrinking before the plunge--what a fellow feels when he's falling in
love, and hesitates, and tries to think it out and hold back, and is
afraid to let the enormous tide flow in and drown him.

Oh, yes, I began to think it over a bit as we raced down the
mountain-side that glorious night. I've read some in my day; my brain's
all right; I've heard of dual personality and subliminal uprush and
conversion--no new line of goods, all that. But somehow these stunts
of the psychologists and philosophers didn't cut any ice with me just
then, because I'd _experienced_ what they merely _explained_. And
explanation was just a bargain sale. The best things can't be explained
at all. There's no real value in a bargain sale.

Arthur had trouble to keep up with me. We were running due east, and
the Earth was turning, therefore, with us. We all three ran together
at _her_ pace--terrific! The moonlight danced along the summits, and
the snow-fields flew like spreading robes, and the forests everywhere,
far and near, hung watching us and booming like a thousand organs.
There were uncaged winds about; you could hear them whistling among the
precipices. But the great thing that I knew was--Beauty, a beauty of
the common old familiar Earth, and a beauty that's stayed with me ever
since, and given me joy and strength and a source of power and delight
I'd never guessed existed before.

       *       *       *       *       *

As we dropped lower into the thicker air of the valley I sobered down.
Gradually the ecstasy passed from me. We slowed up a bit. The lights
and the houses and the sight of the hotel where people were dancing in
a stuffy ballroom, all this put blotting-paper on something that had
been flowing.

Now you'll think this an odd thing too--but when we reached the village
street, I just took Arthur's hand and shook it and said good-night and
went up to bed and slept like a two-year-old till morning. And from
that day to this I've never set eyes on the boy again.

Perhaps it's difficult to explain, and perhaps it isn't. I can explain
it to myself in two lines--I was afraid to see him. I was afraid he
might "explain." I was afraid he might explain "away." I just left a
note--he never replied to it--and went off by a morning train. Can
you understand that? Because if you can't you haven't understood
this account I've tried to give of the experience Arthur gave me.
Well--anyway--I'll just let it go at that.

Arthur's a director now in his father's wholesale chemical business,
and I--well, I'm doing better than ever in the buying and selling of
exchange between banks in New York City as before.

But when I said I was still drawing dividends on my Swiss investment,
I meant it. And it's not "scenery." Everybody gets a thrill from
"scenery." It's a darned sight more than that. It's those little
wayward patches of blue on a cloudy day; those blue pools in the sky
just above Trinity Church steeple when I pass out of Wall Street into
Lower Broadway; it's the rustle of the sea-wind among the Battery
trees; the wash of the waves when the Ferry's starting for Staten
Island, and the glint of the sun far down the Bay, or dropping a bit of
pearl into the old East River. And sometimes it's the strip of cloud
in the west above the Jersey shore of the Hudson, the first star, the
sickle of the new moon behind the masts and shipping. But usually it's
something nearer, bigger, simpler than all or any of these. It's just
the certainty that, when I hurry along the hard stone pavements from
bank to bank, I'm walking on the--Earth. It's just that--_the Earth_!




V

A DESERT EPISODE


1

"Better put wraps on now. The sun's getting low," a girl said.

It was the end of a day's expedition in the Arabian Desert, and they
were having tea. A few yards away the donkeys munched their _barsim_;
beside them in the sand the boys lay finishing bread and jam. Immense,
with gliding tread, the sun's rays slid from crest to crest of the
limestone ridges that broke the huge expanse towards the Red Sea. By
the time the tea-things were packed the sun hovered, a giant ball of
red, above the Pyramids. It stood in the western sky a moment, looking
out of its majestic hood across the sand. With a movement almost
visible it leaped, paused, then leaped again. It seemed to bound
towards the horizon; then, suddenly, was gone.

"It _is_ cold, yes," said the painter, Rivers. And all who heard
looked up at him because of the way he said it. A hurried movement ran
through the merry party, and the girls were on their donkeys quickly,
not wishing to be left to bring up the rear. They clattered off. The
boys cried; the thud of sticks was heard; hoofs shuffled through the
sand and stones. In single file the picnickers headed for Helouan, some
five miles distant. And the desert closed up behind them as they went,
following in a shadowy wave that never broke, noiseless, foamless,
unstreaked, driven by no wind, and of a volume undiscoverable. Against
the orange sunset the Pyramids turned deep purple. The strip of silvery
Nile among its palm trees looked like rising mist. In the incredible
Egyptian afterglow the enormous horizons burned a little longer, then
went out. The ball of the earth--a huge round globe that bulged--curved
visibly as at sea. It was no longer a flat expanse; it turned. Its
splendid curves were realised.

"Better put wraps on; it's cold and the sun is low"--and then the
curious hurry to get back among the houses and the haunts of men. No
more was said, perhaps, than this, yet, the time and place being what
they were, the mind became suddenly aware of that quality which ever
brings a certain shrinking with it--vastness; and more than vastness:
that which is endless because it is also beginningless--eternity. A
colossal splendour stole upon the heart, and the senses, unaccustomed
to the unusual stretch, reeled a little, as though the wonder was
more than could be faced with comfort. Not all, doubtless, realised
it, though to two, at least, it came with a staggering impact there
was no withstanding. For, while the luminous greys and purples crept
round them from the sandy wastes, the hearts of these two became
aware of certain common things whose simple majesty is usually dulled
by mere familiarity. Neither the man nor the girl knew for certain
that the other felt it, as they brought up the rear together; yet
the fact that each _did_ feel it set them side by side in the same
strange circle--and made them silent. They realised the immensity of
a moment: the dizzy stretch of time that led up to the casual pinning
of a veil; to the tightening of a stirrup strap; to the little speech
with a companion; the roar of the vanished centuries that have ground
mountains into sand and spread them over the floor of Africa; above
all, to the little truth that they themselves existed amid the whirl of
stupendous systems all delicately balanced as a spider's web--that they
were _alive_.

For a moment this vast scale of reality revealed itself, then
hid swiftly again behind the débris of the obvious. The universe,
containing their two tiny yet important selves, stood still for an
instant before their eyes. They looked at it--realised that they
belonged to it. Everything moved and had its being, _lived_--here in
this silent, empty desert even more actively than in a city of crowded
houses. The quiet Nile, sighing with age, passed down towards the sea;
there loomed the menacing Pyramids across the twilight; beneath them,
in monstrous dignity, crouched that Shadow from whose eyes of battered
stone proceeds the nameless thing that contracts the heart, then opens
it again to terror; and everywhere, from towering monoliths as from
secret tombs, rose that strange, long whisper which, defying time and
distance, laughs at death. The spell of Egypt, which is the spell of
immortality, touched their hearts.

Already, as the group of picnickers rode homewards now, the first
stars twinkled overhead, and the peerless Egyptian night was on the
way. There was hurry in the passing of the dusk. And the cold sensibly
increased.

"So you did no painting after all," said Rivers to the girl who rode
a little in front of him, "for I never saw you touch your sketch-book
once."

They were some distance now behind the others; the line straggled; and
when no answer came he quickened his pace, drew up alongside and saw
that her eyes, in the reflection of the sunset, shone with moisture.
But she turned her head a little, smiling into his face, so that the
human and the non-human beauty came over him with an onset that was
almost shock. Neither one nor other, he knew, were long for him, and
the realisation fell upon him with a pang of actual physical pain. The
acuteness, the hopelessness of the realisation, for a moment, were more
than he could bear, stern of temper though he was, and he tried to pass
in front of her, urging his donkey with resounding strokes. Her own
animal, however, following the lead, at once came up with him.

"You felt it, perhaps, as I did," he said some moments later,
his voice quite steady again. "The stupendous, everlasting
thing--the--_life_ behind it all." He hesitated a little in his speech,
unable to find the substantive that could compass even a fragment of
his thought. She paused, too, similarly inarticulate before the surge
of incomprehensible feelings.

"It's--awful," she said, half laughing, yet the tone hushed and a
little quaver in it somewhere. And her voice to his was like the first
sound he had ever heard in the world, for the first sound a full-grown
man heard in the world would be beyond all telling--magical. "I shall
not try again," she continued, leaving out the laughter this time; "my
sketch-book is a farce. For, to tell the truth"--and the next three
words she said below her breath--"I dare not."

He turned and looked at her for a second. It seemed to him that the
following wave had caught them up, and was about to break above her,
too. But the big-brimmed hat and the streaming veil shrouded her
features. He saw, instead, the Universe. He felt as though he and
she had always, always been together, and always, always would be.
Separation was inconceivable.

"It came so close," she whispered. "It--shook me!"

They were cut off from their companions, whose voices sounded far
ahead. Her words might have been spoken by the darkness, or by some one
who peered at them from within that following wave. Yet the fanciful
phrase was better than any he could find. From the immeasurable space
of time and distance men's hearts vainly seek to plumb, it drew into
closer perspective a certain meaning that words may hardly compass,
a formidable truth that belongs to that deep place where hope and
doubt fight their incessant battle. The awe she spoke of was the
awe of immortality, of belonging to something that is endless and
beginningless.

And he understood that the tears and laughter were one--caused by
that spell which takes a little human life and shakes it, as an animal
shakes its prey that later shall feed its blood and increase its power
of growth. His other thoughts--really but a single thought--he had not
the right to utter. Pain this time easily routed hope as the wave came
nearer. For it was the wave of death that would shortly break, he knew,
over him, but not over her. Him it would sweep with its huge withdrawal
into the desert whence it came: her it would leave high upon the shores
of life--alone. And yet the separation would somehow not be real. They
were together in eternity even now. They were endless as this desert,
beginningless as this sky ... immortal. The realisation overwhelmed....

The lights of Helouan seemed to come no nearer as they rode on in
silence for the rest of the way. Against the dark background of the
Mokattam Hills these fairy lights twinkled brightly, hanging in
mid-air, but after an hour they were no closer than before. It was like
riding towards the stars. It would take centuries to reach them. There
were centuries in which to do so. Hurry has no place in the desert;
it is born in streets. The desert stands still; to go fast in it is
to go backwards. Now, in particular, its enormous, uncanny leisure
was everywhere--in keeping with that mighty scale the sunset had made
visible. His thoughts, like the steps of the weary animal that bore
him, had no progress in them. The serpent of eternity, holding its tail
in its own mouth, rose from the sand, enclosing himself, the stars--and
her. Behind him, in the hollows of that shadowy wave, the procession
of dynasties and conquests, the great series of gorgeous civilisations
the mind calls Past, stood still, crowded with shining eyes and
beckoning faces, still waiting to arrive. There is no death in Egypt.
His own death stood so close that he could touch it by stretching out
his hand, yet it seemed as much behind as in front of him. What man
called a beginning was a trick. There was no such thing. He was with
this girl--_now_, when Death waited so close for him--yet he had never
really begun. Their lives ran always parallel. The hand he stretched
to clasp approaching death caught instead in this girl's shadowy hair,
drawing her in with him to the centre where he breathed the eternity
of the desert. Yet expression of any sort was as futile as it was
unnecessary. To paint, to speak, to sing, even the slightest gesture of
the soul, became a crude and foolish thing. Silence was here the truth.
And they rode in silence towards the fairy lights.

Then suddenly the rocky ground rose up close before them; boulders
stood out vividly with black shadows and shining heads; a flat-roofed
house slid by; three palm trees rattled in the evening wind; beyond, a
mosque and minaret sailed upwards, like the spars and rigging of some
phantom craft; and the colonnades of the great modern hotel, standing
upon its dome of limestone ridge, loomed over them. Helouan was about
them before they knew it. The desert lay behind with its huge, arrested
billow. Slowly, owing to its prodigious volume, yet with a speed that
merged it instantly with the far horizon behind the night, this wave
now withdrew a little. There was no hurry. It came, for the moment, no
farther. Rivers knew. For he was in it to the throat. Only his head
was above the surface. He still could breathe--and speak--and see.
Deepening with every hour into an incalculable splendour, it waited.


2

In the street the foremost riders drew rein, and, two and two abreast,
the long line clattered past the shops and cafés, the railway station
and hotels, stared at by the natives from the busy pavements. The
donkeys stumbled, blinded by the electric light. Girls in white dresses
flitted here and there, arabîyehs rattled past with people hurrying
home to dress for dinner, and the evening train, just in from Cairo,
disgorged its stream of passengers. There were dances in several of the
hotels that night. Voices rose on all sides. Questions and answers,
engagements and appointments were made, little plans and plots and
intrigues for seizing happiness on the wing--before the wave rolled in
and caught the lot. They chattered gaily:

"You _are_ going, aren't you? You promised----"

"Of course I am."

"Then I'll drive you over. May I call for you?"

"All right. Come at ten."

"We shan't have finished our bridge by then. Say ten-thirty."

And eyes exchanged their meaning signals. The group dismounted and
dispersed. Arabs standing under the lebbekh trees, or squatting on
the pavements before their dim-lit booths, watched them with faces of
gleaming bronze. Rivers gave his bridle to a donkey-boy, and moved
across stiffly after the long ride to help the girl dismount. "You feel
tired?" he asked gently. "It's been a long day." For her face was white
as chalk, though the eyes shone brilliantly.

"Tired, perhaps," she answered, "but exhilarated too. I should like to
be there now. I should like to go back this minute--if some one would
take me." And, though she said it lightly, there was a meaning in her
voice he apparently chose to disregard. It was as if she knew his
secret. "Will you take me--some day soon?"

The direct question, spoken by those determined little lips, was
impossible to ignore. He looked close into her face as he helped her
from the saddle with a spring that brought her a moment half into
his arms. "Some day--soon. I will," he said with emphasis, "when you
are--ready." The pallor in her face, and a certain expression in it he
had not known before, startled him. "I think you have been overdoing
it," he added, with a tone in which authority and love were oddly
mingled, neither of them disguised.

"Like yourself," she smiled, shaking her skirts out and looking down at
her dusty shoes. "I've only a few days more--before I sail. We're both
in such a hurry, but you are the worst of the two."

"Because my time is even shorter," ran his horrified thought--for he
said no word.

She raised her eyes suddenly to his, with an expression that for an
instant almost convinced him she had guessed--and the soul in him
stood rigidly at attention, urging back the rising fires. The hair had
dropped loosely round the sun-burned neck. Her face was level with
his shoulder. Even the glare of the street lights could not make her
undesirable. But behind the gaze of the deep brown eyes another thing
looked forth imperatively into his own. And he recognised it with a
rush of terror, yet of singular exultation.

"It followed us all the way," she whispered. "It came after us from the
desert--where it _lives_."

"At the houses," he said equally low, "it stopped." He gladly adopted
her syncopated speech, for it helped him in his struggle to subdue
those rising fires.

For a second she hesitated. "You mean, if we had not left so soon--when
it turned cold. If we had not hurried--if we had remained a little
longer----"

He caught at her hand, unable to control himself, but dropped it
again the same second, while she made as though she had not noticed,
forgiving him with her eyes. "Or a great deal longer," she added
slowly--"for ever?"

And then he was certain that she _had_ guessed--not that he loved her
above all else in the world, for that was so obvious that a child might
know it, but that his silence was due to his other, lesser secret; that
the great Executioner stood waiting to drop the hood about his eyes. He
was already pinioned. Something in her gaze and in her manner persuaded
him suddenly that she understood.

His exhilaration increased extraordinarily. "I mean," he said very
quietly, "that the spell weakens here among the houses and among
the--so-called living." There was masterfulness, triumph, in his voice.
Very wonderfully he saw her smile change; she drew slightly closer to
his side, as though unable to resist. "Mingled with lesser things we
should not understand completely," he added softly.

"And that might be a mistake, you mean?" she asked quickly, her face
grave again.

It was his turn to hesitate a moment. The breeze stirred the hair about
her neck, bringing its faint perfume--perfume of young life--to his
nostrils. He drew his breath in deeply, smothering back the torrent of
rising words he knew were unpermissible. "Misunderstanding," he said
briefly. "If the eye be single----" He broke off, shaken by a paroxysm
of coughing. "You know my meaning," he continued, as soon as the attack
had passed; "you feel the difference _here_," pointing round him to
the hotels, the shops, the busy stream of people; "the hurry, the
excitement, the feverish, blinding child's play which pretends to be
alive, but does not know it----" And again the coughing stopped him.
This time she took his hand in her own, pressed it very slightly, then
released it. He felt it as the touch of that desert wave upon his soul.
"The reception must be in complete and utter resignation. Tainted by
lesser things, the disharmony might be----" he began stammeringly.

Again there came interruption, as the rest of the party called
impatiently to know if they were coming up to the hotel. He had not
time to find the completing adjective. Perhaps he could not find it
ever. Perhaps it does not exist in any modern language. Eternity is not
realised to-day; men have no time to know they are alive for ever; they
are too busy....

They all moved in a clattering, merry group towards the big hotel.
Rivers and the girl were separated.


3

There was a dance that evening, but neither of these took part in
it. In the great dining-room their tables were far apart. He could
not even see her across the sea of intervening heads and shoulders.
The long meal over, he went to his room, feeling it imperative to
be alone. He did not read, he did not write; but, leaving the light
unlit, he wrapped himself up and leaned out upon the broad window-sill
into the great Egyptian night. His deep-sunken thoughts, like to the
crowding stars, stood still, yet for ever took new shapes. He tried
to see behind them, as, when a boy, he had tried to see behind the
constellations--out into space--where there is nothing.

Below him the lights of Helouan twinkled like the Pleiades reflected in
a pool of water; a hum of queer soft noises rose to his ears; but just
beyond the houses the desert stood at attention, the vastest thing he
had ever known, very stern, yet very comforting, with its peace beyond
all comprehension, its delicate, wild terror, and its awful message
of immortality. And the attitude of his mind, though he did not know
it, was one of prayer.... From time to time he went to lie on the bed
with paroxysms of coughing. He had overtaxed his strength--his swiftly
fading strength. The wave had risen to his lips.

Nearer forty than thirty-five, Paul Rivers had come out to Egypt,
plainly understanding that with the greatest care he might last a few
weeks longer than if he stayed in England. A few more times to see the
sunset and the sunrise, to watch the stars, feel the soft airs of earth
upon his cheeks; a few more days of intercourse with his kind, asking
and answering questions, wearing the old familiar clothes he loved,
reading his favourite pages, and then--out into the big spaces--where
there is nothing.

Yet no one, from his stalwart, energetic figure, would have guessed--no
one but the expert mind, not to be deceived, to whom in the first
attack of overwhelming despair and desolation he went for final advice.
He left that house, as many had left it before, knowing that soon he
would need no earthly protection of roof and walls, and that his soul,
if it existed, would be shelterless in the space behind all manifested
life. He had looked forward to fame and position in this world; had,
indeed, already achieved the first step towards this end; and now,
with the vanity of all earthly aims so mercilessly clear before him,
he had turned, in somewhat of a nervous, concentrated hurry, to make
terms with the Infinite while still the brain was there. And had, of
course, found nothing. For it takes a lifetime crowded with experiment
and effort to learn even the alphabet of genuine faith; and what could
come of a few weeks' wild questioning but confusion and bewilderment
of mind? It was inevitable. He came out to Egypt wondering, thinking,
questioning, but chiefly wondering. He had grown, that is, more
childlike, abandoning the futile tool of Reason, which hitherto had
seemed to him the perfect instrument. Its foolishness stood naked
before him in the pitiless light of the specialist's decision.
For--"Who can by searching find out God?"

To be exceedingly careful of over-exertion was the final warning he
brought with him, and, within a few hours of his arrival, three weeks
ago, he had met this girl and utterly disregarded it. He took it
somewhat thus: "Instead of lingering I'll enjoy myself and go out--a
little sooner. I'll _live_. The time is very short." His was not a
nature, anyhow, that could heed a warning. He could not kneel. Upright
and unflinching, he went to meet things as they came, reckless, unwise,
but certainly not afraid. And this characteristic operated now. He ran
to meet Death full tilt in the uncharted spaces that lay behind the
stars. With love for a companion now, he raced, his speed increasing
from day to day, she, as he thought, knowing merely that he sought her,
but had not guessed his darker secret that was now his _lesser_ secret.

And in the desert, this afternoon of the picnic, the great thing he
sped to meet had shown itself with its familiar touch of appalling
cold and shadow, familiar, because all minds know of and accept it;
appalling because, until realised close, and with the mental power at
the full, it remains but a name the heart refuses to believe in. And he
had discovered that its name was--Life.

Rivers had seen the Wave that sweeps incessant, tireless, but as a
rule invisible, round the great curve of the bulging earth, brushing
the nations into the deeps behind. It had followed him home to the
streets and houses of Helouan. He saw it _now_, as he leaned from his
window, dim and immense, too huge to break. Its beauty was nameless,
undecipherable. His coughing echoed back from the wall of its great
sides.... And the music floated up at the same time from the ball-room
in the opposite wing. The two sounds mingled. Life, which is love, and
Death, which is their unchanging partner, held hands beneath the stars.

He leaned out farther to drink in the cool, sweet air. Soon, on this
air, his body would be dust, driven, perhaps, against her very cheek,
trodden on possibly by her little foot--until, in turn, she joined him
too, blown by the same wind loose about the desert. True. Yet at the
same time they would always be together, always somewhere side by side,
continuing in the vast universe, _alive_. This new, absolute conviction
was in him now. He remembered the curious, sweet perfume in the desert,
as of flowers, where yet no flowers are. It was the perfume of life.
But in the desert there is no life. Living things that grow and move
and utter, are but a protest against death. In the desert they are
unnecessary, because death there _is_ not. Its overwhelming vitality
needs no insolent, visible proof, no protest, no challenge, no little
signs of life. The message of the desert is immortality....

He went finally to bed, just before midnight. Hovering magnificently
just outside his window, Death watched him while he slept. The wave
crept to the level of his eyes. He called her name....

       *       *       *       *       *

And downstairs, meanwhile, the girl, knowing nothing, wondered where he
was, wondered unhappily and restlessly; more--though this she did not
understand--wondered motheringly. Until to-day, on the ride home, and
from their singular conversation together, she had guessed nothing of
his reason for being at Helouan, where so many come in order to find
life. She only knew her own. And she was but twenty-five....

Then, in the desert, when that touch of unearthly chill had stolen out
of the sand towards sunset, she had realised clearly, astonished she
had not seen it long ago, that this man loved her, yet that something
prevented his obeying the great impulse. In the life of Paul Rivers,
whose presence had profoundly stirred her heart the first time she saw
him, there was some obstacle that held him back, a barrier his honour
must respect. He could never tell her of his love. It could lead to
nothing. Knowing that he was not married, her intuition failed her
utterly at first. Then, in their silence on the homeward ride, the
truth had somehow pressed up and touched her with its hand of ice. In
that disjointed conversation at the end, which reads as it sounded, as
though no coherent meaning lay behind the words, and as though both
sought to conceal by speech what yet both burned to utter, she had
divined his darker secret, and knew that it was the same as her own.
She understood then it was Death that had tracked them from the desert,
following with its gigantic shadow from the sandy wastes. The cold,
the darkness, the silence which cannot answer, the stupendous mystery
which is the spell of its inscrutable Presence, had risen about them
in the dusk, and kept them company at a little distance, until the
lights of Helouan had bade it halt. Life which may not, cannot end, had
frightened her.

His time, perhaps, was even shorter than her own. None knew his secret,
since he was alone in Egypt and was caring for himself. Similarly,
since she bravely kept her terror to herself, her mother had no inkling
of her own, aware merely that the disease was in her system and that
her orders were to be extremely cautious. This couple, therefore,
shared secretly together the two clearest glimpses of eternity life
has to offer to the soul. Side by side they looked into the splendid
eyes of Love and Death. Life, moreover, with its instinct for simple
and terrific drama, had produced this majestic climax, breaking with
pathos, at the very moment when it could not be developed--this side
of the stars. They stood together upon the stage, a stage emptied of
other human players; the audience had gone home and the lights were
being lowered; no music sounded; the critics were a-bed. In this great
game of Consequences it was known where he met her, what he said and
what she answered, possibly what they did and even what the world
thought. But "what the consequence was" would remain unknown, untold.
That would happen in the big spaces of which the desert in its silence,
its motionless serenity, its shelterless, intolerable vastness, is the
perfect symbol. And the desert gives no answer. It sounds no challenge,
for it is complete. Life in the desert makes no sign. It _is_.


4

In the hotel that night there arrived by chance a famous International
dancer, whose dahabîyeh lay anchored at San Giovanni, in the Nile below
Helouan; and this woman, with her party, had come to dine and take
part in the festivities. The news spread. After twelve the lights were
lowered, and while the moonlight flooded the terraces, streaming past
pillar and colonnade, she rendered in the shadowed halls the music of
the Masters, interpreting with an instinctive genius messages which are
eternal and divine.

Among the crowd of enthralled and delighted guests, the girl sat
on the steps and watched her. The rhythmical interpretation held a
power that seemed, in a sense, inspired; there lay in it a certain
unconscious something that was pure, unearthly; something that the
stars, wheeling in stately movements over the sea and desert know;
something the great winds bring to mountains where they play together;
something the forests capture and fix magically into their gathering
of big and little branches. It was both passionate and spiritual, wild
and tender, intensely human and seductively non-human. For it was
original, taught of Nature, a revelation of naked, unhampered life. It
comforted, as the desert comforts. It brought the desert awe into the
stuffy corridors of the hotel, with the moonlight and the whispering
of stars, yet behind it ever the silence of those grey, mysterious,
interminable spaces which utter to themselves the wordless song of
life. For it was the same dim thing, she felt, that had followed her
from the desert several hours before, halting just outside the streets
and houses as though blocked from further advance; the thing that
had stopped her foolish painting, skilled though she was, because it
hides behind colour and not in it; the thing that veiled the meaning
in the cryptic sentences she and he had stammered out together; the
thing, in a word, as near as she could approach it by any means of
interior expression, that the realisation of death for the first time
makes comprehensible--Immortality. It was unutterable, but it _was_.
He and she were indissolubly together. Death was no separation. There
was no death.... It was terrible. It was--she had already used the
word--awful, full of awe.

"In the desert," thought whispered, as she watched spellbound, "it
is impossible even to conceive of death. The idea is meaningless. It
simply is not."

The music and the movement filled the air with life which, being
there, must continue always, and continuing always can have never had
a beginning. Death, therefore, was the great revealer of life. Without
it none could realise that they are alive. Others had discovered this
before her, but she did 

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