Chapter V: Part 5

“Guy! Guy!”

He stopped and turned, his face and attitude contemptuous. Running up to him, she threw her arms about his neck and, half-sobbing, half-laughing, stammered:

“Guy! Dear Guy! I was only fooling you. They were not your letters--not one of them. Your dearest letters I carry in my breast, next to my heart.”

He pressed his face hard against her neck.

“You little devil, you! Why do we torture each other like this?”

She clung to him desperately.

“Marry me! Marry me!” she implored.

“Yes, I will: I’m damned if I won’t. But, I warn you--look out! We shall both have a hell of a time.”

“But there’ll be a month or two of heaven first,” she said, and, opening his shirt at the neck, she kissed him low down on his breast.

THE STORM

To Mary Harrison

Xavier Petrovski was English in spite of his name, appearance, and his temperament.

“As for his appearance,” said Judith Lesueur to her sister, Marian, “well, it’s too ravishing for words. Eyes that melt, my dear--melt with their own fire.”

Marian laughed.

“I never like your little gods, your little tin gods; your little gods of flesh and blood. And I particularly hate the melting variety. Just like the butter you get in the Café Roma in August.”

His temperament was melancholy, for he was cursed with a hot, uneasy ambition that goaded him on to work till his body grew tired, his brain stale, and his spirit dejected. He believed himself to be a musical composer.

“I have genius: I _know_ I have genius,” he said, over and over again in spring nights when he lay in his lodging overlooking the sea.

And then he would sleep and dream, his brain ravished by sumptuous harmonies, his very flesh soothed by sound.

For a living he played the violin in the Orient Café, for he was a member of the Ostrovsky Quartet. From three o’clock in the afternoon till midnight he played, whilst the loose men and women of Salonika danced and drank and ate. In the mornings he composed music and counted up the money he had saved. For Xavier was nothing if not practical. He was not going to miss the reward of his genius by foolish conduct or faulty management of his affairs. Already he had saved £800. Not a penny was spent that could by any contriving be added to his hoard. In a little while he would take his money to London, and then! Oh, then he would show them! The finest orchestra in the world should play his music and the critics should praise it; it should be printed and sold; his name should be on the lips of every man. Fame: money: the companionship of the great: the smiles of women: the intoxication of life lived to the full. All should be his. In a little while. He was sure of it.

At least, sometimes he was sure. In his happy moments, his moods of exaltation. But there were black moods.

“Is it possible that I have written these inanities?” he would sometimes ask himself. “I am a fool, sick with vanity, eaten up with egomania.”

In one of these unendurable moods he met Judith Lesueur, the most beautiful and most cultured demirep in all Salonika.

“Oh, Miss Lesueur,” he exclaimed, “do help me.”

“What is it?” she asked, smiling. “Has someone been horrid to you?” (She always treated him as though he were a child.)

“No: but I’m terribly depressed: my music won’t come right. I looked at my String Serenade this morning, and it is inconceivable that I should have written such ridiculous stuff. And when I was writing it I thought it was so splendid.”

“It probably _is_ splendid,” she said, sympathetically; “everyone has moods. Come to the Café and drink with me.”

“Oh, no!” he protested. “This rotten feeling--I must walk it off. Drink would only make me worse.”

But, instead of going a long tramp as he had intended, he returned to his lodgings, and sat brooding at his open window. His thoughts turned to his dead father: he also had been a composer of music, and he had been one of life’s failures. He had worked hard and very patiently, but no one had ever played anything he had written.

Xavier rose from his chair and walked across the room to a big chest full of MSS., all in his father’s neat writing. He turned over page after page--symphonies, overtures, songs, string quartets. How like his father this music was!--mystical, tender, exquisite. “Like the poems of Rossetti,” Xavier murmured to himself. Soon he became so absorbed in his father’s work, that he nearly lost consciousness of himself. The music he was reading murmured and sang in his ears. His father’s very spirit seemed to suspire from the pages. Almost could his voice be heard. It was as though the soul of the dead man was brooding over his living son....

Some of the music had been written only ten years ago: it was very much in advance of its period, and perhaps it was for this reason that both publishers and conductors had disdained it. Xavier’s father had lived in London where, it is true, good music cannot for long go unrecognized; but he had been proud and almost vainly sensitive, and the rejection of a composition used to throw him into a condition of despair so great, that months would pass before he could persuade himself to give the work another chance. His sensitive pride had been his ruin....

Xavier, wrapped up in his own work, had not for some years examined his father’s music, and had never divined its true quality; but now he recognized its extraordinary distinction, its peculiar originality, its brooding power and barbed eloquence. Oblivious of time, he read on until his landlady entered with his lunch.

“We are going to have a thunderstorm,” she said, looking at the copper sky.

“Very likely,” he said, his eyes still on the music.

And while he ate his frugal meal, he continued reading his father’s music; he absorbed it until it was time to go to the Orient Café. As he walked slowly thither, he felt that during the last few hours his personality had undergone a strange metamorphosis. He was not himself: something had been added to him: some luxury, a kind of mental wantonness--had entered his spirit unawares. His mind was larger, his imagination more rapid and higher in its flights.

There was something ghostly in this, something, perhaps, even threatening. But no doubt the minatory feeling came from the sulphur sky that hung so low, a sky heavy with electricity and sulky with spleen....

The dances he and his comrades played that afternoon and evening meant less than nothing to him, for he did not even hear them. One performs mechanically the acts one performs frequently. The music that was in the air about him was the music he had read that morning.

At midnight, the day’s work over, he left the Café and sought his lodging. There were no stars. Thunder had begun to mutter, but as yet no rain had fallen. Faint fires trembled in the sky. Xavier felt the excitement of something important about to happen. His brain teemed with ideas. As soon as he got home, he would begin to compose.

“‘The Storm!’” he said, suddenly, speaking aloud. “The storm that never breaks--that’s an idea, and a damned good one, too. The storm that is always threatening and never begins. Something brooding, something gathering itself together, something couching, something licking its chops. And nothing ever happening.”

He knitted his brows in deep thought, and by the time he had reached his room, musical ideas for his composition were already filling his mind.

He sat down and wrote. Muted horns cried mysteriously on the paper before him in discords that were continually on the point of being, but never were, resolved.... At the end of an hour he read what he had written; from the very first bar it was good. It was with difficulty that he kept his excitement under control. He worked without effort, without thought, but with deep and disturbed feeling. His pen moved mechanically, and he could but wonder at its strange activity.

Just before dawn, he lay down and fell asleep. At the end of the third hour of his slumber, he awoke suddenly, all his senses fresh and alert. The sun was in his room. Anxiously he bounded out of bed, and sat down at his little table near the window, scanning his MS. with eager eyes. The muted horns made magic music. Yes--it was fine! Every note of it was fine! How mysteriously yet significantly the strings stirred! How broodingly the wood-wind kept suggesting the principal theme that was never fully stated!

It was with a trembling fear that he took his pen in hand. Had his inspiration failed? Had that mood gone? No: without effort he began at the point at which he had left off. Though it was happy day outside, the storm was still brewing on his paper. Little flickers of flame danced on his sky’s edge: a black turbulence was at his zenith....

Three days later, his Symphonic Poem was finished, and he sought out Judith Lesueur that she might share his joy.

“Oh, Miss Lesueur,” he said, bursting into her flat, “do sympathize with me!”

“What is it?” she asked. “Has someone been horrid to you?”

“No: I’m so happy I can’t remain alone. I’ve written a wonderful work: I can’t believe it is I who have written it. And really--don’t laugh at me!--it just seemed to me all the time that somebody else was writing it for me.”

“Oh, I’m _so_ glad. If you weren’t so terribly virtuous, I would kiss you.”

Involuntarily, he moved a pace or two away from her. She held out her hand.

“Don’t be afraid, dear friend!” She smiled on him. “If you are happy, I am also. And now, I suppose, you’ll be going to London and I shall see you no more. Poor Judith!”

“Yes,” he answered, “I shall be going soon. It describes a storm--the gathering of a storm: clouds coming out of the vacant blue and massing together: yellow, treacherous vapours emerging from God knows where: enmity in the air. But the storm never breaks. All the thick, heavy passions of nature mingle until they become clogged. And then the music stops, choked by its own congestion.”

Judith did not understand him: he was just a little mad, she thought.

“I do hope it will be a success,” she said. “I’m sure it will. But I wish I was coming to London with you to hear it.”

He glanced at her rather shyly.

“Do you?” he asked. “Do you, really?”

“Why, of course I do. I want to _see_ your success: I want to be with you in the midst of it.”

“Perhaps, some day ...” he said, vaguely, blushing a little. “Well, good-bye,” he added, “I must be off to the Café now.”

* * * * *

London was much kinder than Xavier Petrovski had anticipated, for he had not reflected that all cities, all people, are kind to men who have money to spend. He came with letters of introduction, and was soon on friendly terms with many musicians, critics, and people of social influence. A German firm of publishers had already accepted a volume of his songs, and the wealthy amateur, Countess Idionowsky, had arranged for an evening of his music to be given at her house in Portman Square. His timid manner, his air of distinction, and the “melting” eyes, which Judith had tried to describe to her sister, made him very popular with women, and he received more invitations than he could accept.

More satisfactory than anything else, he had been able to secure Queen’s Hall for an evening in the first week in June, and Marcel Xystobam was to conduct for him, and the great soprano, Alice Gardner, was to sing a group of his songs and a scene from his opera _Dido_.

On this concert, and in advertising it, he had spent a large portion of his hoard. All his hopes for the future were centered on this event. If it failed, his life would be broken, his ambition killed. But the thought of failure rarely entered his mind, so full were his days of happiness, so continuous was the flow of praise he received from his new friends.

In the afternoon of the day before his orchestral concert, a stranger called to see Xavier at his hotel. He was a tall ascetic-looking man, fashionably dressed, courteous, even a little deferential.

“My name is Shaw--Geoffrey Shaw,” he said, “and I have called to see you because I knew your father well: indeed, he was a dear friend of mine.”

Xavier, who had been writing at a desk when the stranger entered, rose excitedly to his feet.

“You knew my father?” he asked.

“Yes. I was with him when he died. In those days I was not so ... so well-circumstanced as I am now, or perhaps he would not have died when he did. I was one of those who had faith in him--in his genius.”

“Tell me about him. You know, I was only fifteen when he died, and during the last two years of his life I never saw him at all.”

So the stranger told Xavier of his father’s last years--of his patient courage, his extraordinary capacity for work, his sensitiveness.

“He really had very great powers,” Shaw continued, “but the weakness in him was that he had not sufficient faith in himself. His faith came and went. A single hostile word was sufficient to make him suspect his own genius.”

He stayed for half-an-hour and then rose to go.

“I am going to your concert to-morrow, of course,” he said; “perhaps you will come and sup at my flat when it is over. My place is in Oxford Street, less than five minutes’ walk from Queen’s Hall.”

“I shall be delighted.”

* * * * *

There are few experiences so salutary, and yet at the same time so galling, as that undergone by an inexperienced composer when he listens to the first performance of his orchestral works. His music may look extraordinarily lucid on paper, but in actual performance all kinds of elaborately calculated effects fail to “come off”: they are destroyed by lack of balance between the different sections of the orchestra. The ideas are there, but they are not heard.

At the long rehearsal of his music, Xavier suffered deeply. It seemed to him that his compositions were like exquisite paintings at which handfuls of mud had been thrown: the tender sound would suddenly become meaningless noise: muddy patches here and there stopped and choked the logical continuity of his work.

When he first noticed this, his instinct was to throw the blame on his conductor, Marcel Xystobam, but two or three minutes’ reflection disclosed to him that the fault was in the writing itself, and not in the manner of its interpretation. Only one work, “The Storm,” came out in sound precisely as he had heard it in his inner ear; his other compositions were palpably the work of an untried, though gifted, amateur.

* * * * *

Xavier Petrovski sat writhing at his own music.

The large audience was obviously bored; even Alice Gardner’s appearance did not lift them out of their apathy. During the interval many left the hall. The applause bestowed on each composition could only just be heard. All the critics were already congregated round the refreshment bar. Nothing but a miracle could prevent the concert from being the most conspicuous failure of the season.

There was nothing from which Xavier could derive consolation. The fault was his own. His music was the music of a man who had not learned the technique of his art; the sounds that reached him from the orchestra were not the sounds that had come to him in the silence of his room in Salonika; through lack of skill--through want of experience--he had failed to record what he had heard.

After what to the composer seemed hours of misery, the last work was reached. He knew well that if the audience were in a mood to listen, “The Storm” could not fail of its effect. In rehearsal, it had been peculiarly impressive. Not a single note was miscalculated: it was the work of a mature mind: it had all the attributes of genius.

And to-night, the very first bars gripped the tired and disappointed listeners. They forgot their disappointment in listening to this strange disturbing sound. Brooding yet passionate, the music filled the hall: it flickered like flame; it rolled, like heavy waters; it menaced, like distant, just-heard thunder. It made its listeners believe that something terrible was about to happen. And when all the black beauty of it had passed away without its threatened terrible culmination, the listeners felt an exquisite relief that expressed itself in thunderous applause.

Not until the conductor had signified with an expressive gesture that the composer was not present and could not therefore bow his acknowledgments from the platform, did the audience begin to disperse....

At the entrance of the hall Xavier Petrovski found his new friend, Geoffrey Shaw, waiting for him. The meeting of the two men was constrained; it seemed almost as though they were enemies compelled to meet on a matter of business. They began to walk towards Oxford Street.

“I wish to God I had stayed in Salonika,” said Petrovski, at length, “for it’s all been waste.”

His companion tried to comfort him.

“You have not yet had the experience that every composer needs before he can become successful--the kind of experience that you can’t get out there in Greece. You must stay in London--live here. You would learn quickly all that is required.”

“But my ‘Storm’ succeeded, didn’t it?”

For a moment Shaw made no reply. Then:

“Yes,” he said; “that work was a great success.”

“But they tell me the critics did not stop to hear it. They all left the hall long before the concert was finished. I do not blame them, but it’s a pity they did not hear my best work.... I feel like a beginner, Mr. Shaw--I have everything yet to learn. And for some years I have been flattering myself that I was a master of my art.”

“Don’t be too despondent, my dear fellow. You’ve got the stuff in you all right: it only wants bringing out and putting into proper shape.”

“Yes; but the curious thing is that my work, ‘The Storm,’ is absolutely free from all faults of inexperience. It might almost have been written by another man.”

They had now reached Shaw’s flat. His host unlocked the door and led him to his dining-room where supper was laid.

Shaw’s sympathetic kindness and, no doubt, the wine also soon put Petrovski into a more hopeful frame of mind. When they had finished supper, Shaw invited his guest into his library. The room contained nothing but books, a desk, and a couple of easy chairs.

“I have something here I want to show you,” he said, very gravely. “It is a MS. of your father’s--he gave it to me a few weeks before his death. I happen to know it is the only copy in existence; and I was present when he destroyed the preliminary sketch on which this composition is founded.”

Taking a thin volume from a cabinet, he opened it at the first page and placed it before his guest.

At the very first glance Petrovski uttered an exclamation of surprise. Then, bending over it, he examined it hurriedly and with the utmost agitation. His hands trembled so violently that he could scarcely turn over the pages.

“Good God!” he exclaimed at length; “it’s ‘The Storm'--note for note--my own work!”

He transferred his gaze from the MS. to his host.

“What does it mean?” he asked; “in God’s name, what does it mean?”

THE MAN WHO GAVE HIS SOUL

To Walter H. Mudie

Dmitri passed his life in doing good. In that lay all his happiness. In the whole of Salonika there was no man or woman so vile, so incorrigibly steeped in iniquity, as to fail to stir his compassion. All men were his brothers: all men, he sometimes thought, were himself.

He preached in the streets and in the markets, and this is the gospel the young man brought to his hearers.

“All forms of consciousness are God. If the trees are conscious, then they are part of God. If lions are conscious, they also are God. The more alive a man is--the more conscious he is of himself and his environment--the more of God’s spirit does he possess. For God is a vast, infinite, potential Intelligence that is conscious of itself only through us--and, perhaps, through forms of life that are not human, and, maybe, through certain minerals and gases that appear to have some of the attributes of consciousness. Of these last things I do not speak with certainty. But sure it is that each man and woman has within him and her something of the Holy Spirit. God sees through our eyes and hears with our ears. Therefore, we are all God: we are all the same. Between the ‘wicked’ man and the ‘good’ man there is no shadow of difference. If one hates another, he is hating himself.”

His pleasant, eager smile, his vehement eyes, and his tall, athletic frame made many women desire him, but he went to bed with none, for all the grosser appetites of his body seemed to have been sublimated into an ecstatic spiritual passion that spent itself in a thousand deeds of compassionate love.

They thought him mad, but they never reviled or taunted him, for he was known throughout the entire breadth of that city as a man of noble deeds and imperishable kindness.

“Poor boy!” said Susannah, the Jewish woman who sold vegetables, “‘tis a pity so fine a fellow should be wasted. Those lips of his were made for kissing.”

“You say what is right,” agreed Zacyntha, a lewd Greek woman. “A night of love with him would but whet one’s appetite.”

Strange it was that none of those women of the half-world ever attempted to tamper with him, but vileness must always recognize and fear what is pure. They gazed at him often with eyes of longing, it is true, but the gaze he gave in return was always the very negation of sex.

“A fool! A Parsifal!” commented the respectable ladies, for most of them would most gladly have lost their respectability had Dmitri been willing to snatch it from them.

Now, in a dark street of that city it was that Dmitri dwelt, inhabiting two rooms in the house of Jacques Laborde, a young Frenchman who taught many languages. Jacques and his wife, Madelein, loved him for his goodness, but a time came when they were afraid on his account.

“You have noticed something, eh?” asked Madelein one night, as she and her husband sat alone.

“About _him_?... Yes, yes. How can one express it? It is just as though he had begun to lose himself, as though he had spent so much of himself that there was little left to spend--less every day.”

“Yes--that’s it. Yet his appetite is good, he is as strong as ever, and he has never been more cheerful.”

“Do you ever feel,” asked Jacques, after a pause, “do you ever feel when he is talking to you, that he is giving you something of himself--merging his personality into yours?”

“That _is_ the feeling. I don’t like it. Just as though his soul was escaping from his body into mine.... Sometimes, Jacques, I’ve felt as though something of his personality--something ghostly, ghastly, too--had floated from him to me. It’s made a change in me. It’s coloured me faintly, like a few drops of red wine in a glass of water. Is such a thing possible?”

“I don’t know,” answered her husband, uneasily. “Tell me: has the change in you been for evil or for good?”

She pondered a minute.

“Neither one nor the other, I think,” she answered. “The change has made me more vivid: it has sharpened me--put an edge on my feelings. Perhaps, really, it has made me more myself.”

“Why have you not spoken of this before?”

She laughed, nervously.

“Because it was uncanny, and I was uncertain. I’m not certain even now. One gets fanciful in my condition. Mamma has warned me to expect strange thoughts.”

Jacques clenched and unclenched his fists.

“It’s only fancy--of course it’s only fancy.”

“Yet there _is_ a change in Dmitri!” urged Madelein.

“Yes. But if Dmitri changes, we don’t.”

He put an end to the conversation by going into the kitchen to draw beer.

But when, later that evening, Dmitri entered the house and looked into their room for a chat before going to bed, they were immediately startled by his appearance and manner.

“Is all well with you?” asked the young Greek, standing in the doorway.

“Yes, indeed,” answered Jacques. “And you?”

“I am so happy,” answered Dmitri, “that I could almost shout with it. I am getting to the heart of the Great Secret at last. I am beginning to prove from my own experience that what I have always preached is true.”

His large, magnetic eyes dropped their gaze first upon Jacques and then upon Madelein: upon her eyes his gaze floated, and then sank into them. He was not looking at her eyes, nor yet beyond them: he was penetrating within them. The woman did not flinch, but greedily drank his gaze.

“What are you doing?” she asked, in a whisper.

“Do you not feel,” he asked, slowly, “that you are not now what you were a minute ago?”

“Dmitri! Dmitri!” exclaimed Jacques; “you must not do that.”

But the Greek did not move his gaze from the woman’s face.

“We are all one,” he said; “there is no real separation between any of us: it is merely these houses of flesh that keep us divided. When our bodies die, all our souls will merge into one Soul.”

Jacques rose timidly, and put his hand on Dmitri’s arm.

“You must not do that!” he said, gently.

And because Dmitri still gazed into Madelein’s eyes and she into his, Jacques placed himself between them and broke the spell.

“Sit down, Dmitri,” said Jacques.

Dmitri’s face had the look of a man whose soul is being disintegrated. He had lost his personality. His eyes were dull, his face was lifeless. His body, his movements, his attitude still suggested abundant strength: simply, his spirit had suffered eclipse.

“I want to give myself to my fellows,” he muttered, “but no one will take me. I am the rejected of all men. My soul is sent back to its home each time it tries to escape.”

He sat down heavily, and brooded.

There, a little later, they left him, for his mood of gladness had been transformed into one of gloom, and though next morning, as he dressed, Dmitri sang out of a deep heart filled to the brim with joy, Jacques looked significantly and sorrowfully at his wife. She, in turn, questioned him with her eyes. But neither spoke.

* * * * *

A week passed.

There came a day when Dmitri, feeling that almost any time now his soul might leave his body never to return, decided to stay indoors and give a final revision to the little book he had written.

His bedroom window looked upon a narrow street. Across the way was a wine-shop, and even at this early hour a few men were sitting drinking at the little tables placed on the pavement. For a few minutes Dmitri stood gazing lovingly and compassionately at the passers-by; then, abruptly, and with a sudden sigh, he turned away, and sat down at a small table upon which he had placed the MS. of his book.

He read steadily from the beginning. Half-way through he came upon this passage.

_The soul clings to its body; the spirit yearns for its
companion-flesh. Is it true that only death can separate them?_

_It is impossible for us to love others more than we love
ourselves, if our souls cling to us in this despairing way. Loving
is giving: loving is surrender of one’s self: one’s self is one’s
soul.... But my soul refuses to be surrendered. It will not leave
me. Even when, because of my love for others, I try to banish it
from my body, it will not go, or, if it does go, it soon returns.
Is it refused, I wonder, by those to whom I give it?_

_Often I feel people wanting me; often I feel them asking for me.
The magnetic ones draw me._

He sat and pondered. He recalled how, throughout the whole of his life, he had with joy spent himself upon others. A passion for giving had always been his. As a boy, he frequently had felt an aching desire to give himself to the sea--to swim out into the depths and, spreading out his arms, swoon away into nothingness, making himself a part of that water. Sometimes, even, he had wanted to give himself to fire, to walk naked into a white, inviting furnace. And, always, when on the edge of a cliff, he felt the great pull of space--a quick eagerness to disappear, to dissipate himself into nothingness.... To give himself--no matter to what, if only it were greater than he--was the passion that haunted him continually. Not to cease his existence; not to cast the universe from him; not to repudiate the life that had been given him. But to live more fiercely in flame, more largely and grandly as a part of a great giant ocean, more freely as an atom in illimitable space.

Best of all, to give himself to humanity: not to live in one body, but in a million bodies....

As he sat, a thought came to him--a thought that thrust into and pierced him, as a sword thrusts and pierces, that shook him to the very foundations of his being.

“If one man cannot draw from me my soul, a great crowd of men may--nay, must,” he told himself; “I know that even one man or woman can take from me and absorb for a brief period something of my spirit; surely, when a thousand men and women are pulling at me like a thousand magnets, my spirit will go entirely out of me and live in them for ever.”

The argument seemed so logical and so obvious, that he wondered at himself for not thinking of it before.

He abandoned the reading of his MS., and began to pace the room. His excitement almost frenzied him, and his thoughts ran wildly.

“I must dress for the occasion. A purple robe. And a message. I shall give it out that I have a message. At the north of the Citadel it shall be, and as I talk to them I shall face the east.”

He visualized the waiting crowd so vividly that his body acted as though the occasion had already arrived. He stopped walking and threw out his arms. His eyes became dilated. His lips moved. And then from his moving lips a torrent of speaking poured. He held his hearers. Even the little children in his brain were awed: he saw them huddling against their mothers.... With a shudder he came to himself.

* * * * *

There were many newspaper offices to visit. One of them, in return for a column advertisement, agreed to publish an “interview” with him. He advertised his meeting outside the Citadel in every newspaper, however obscure, for he felt he had no further use for his savings. “When my soul leaves me altogether,” he whispered, to himself, “my body will die.” He bought a scarlet robe in the Bazaar.

Jacques and Madelein watched him anxiously during the following days. Several times he spoke to them of his “ending,” and told them it was near at hand. He put his small affairs carefully in order, and handed what remained of his savings to Jacques.

“I will keep it for you,” said Jacques.

“No: it is yours. In a day or two I shall have no further use for money. Only the husk of me will remain.”

Jacques looked at him very sternly.

“Have I been a good friend to you, Dmitri?” he asked.

“Why, yes. Always. You and Madelein have always been my best friends.”

“Well, then, tell me what you are going to do. Why do you hand me your money? Why do you speak of only the husk of you remaining? What is the meaning of your advertisements in the newspapers?”

Dmitri smiled.

“Do not be anxious about me, Jacques,” he entreated; “no harm will come to me--only a great good. The most wonderful thing that can happen to anybody is about to happen to me.”

And Jacques’ further persuasion had no power to make Dmitri speak.

* * * * *

As Dmitri, clad in his purple robe, walked through the streets of Salonika on the evening appointed for his meeting outside the Citadel, he was followed by a large crowd of friendly people; indeed, he walked in the midst of the crowd, talking as he went. He bore himself regally, and his face shone with joy.

He had only a mere handful of disciples, but there were very many, both rich and poor, who liked him, and there were still more who were driven by curiosity to that high ground outside the city walls, which looks towards the jagged mountains above Hortiach.

Having arrived at the place he had selected for the delivery of his Message, his disciples went among the assembled people, directing them where to sit. Men and women, to the number of nearly a thousand, seated themselves in a semicircle on the higher slopes of the hill; on the hill’s summit stood Dmitri, looking down upon the faces lit by the sun in its setting.

Bareheaded, he stood and raised both arms for silence. The eager speech of his beholders died suddenly. Dmitri stood for a long minute without a word: then, just when the silence was becoming uncomfortable, he spoke in his golden voice.

“Many of you have come here from curiosity; a few have come because of their love. But I have the same message for everyone. All the great teachers of the world have loved their fellows: no man can teach or be taught without love. Because I desire to teach you something now, I ask any of you who hate me, or secretly jeer at me, or despise me, to kill that hate and that mockery and that contempt. Indeed, no man among you can hate me without also hating himself. For we are all one. We are not a thousand different souls, but one soul. There is only one soul in all the wide world, but each of your bodies contains a part of that soul: the great, brooding spirit of the Universe is split up into millions of parts. Of those millions of parts I possess but one. It is the dearest thing I have: it is the _only_ thing I have. My body is nothing--just dust. It is the same with you all: your bodies are merely the prisons of your souls.

“Many of you will not understand me now, but I ask you, when I am gone from among you, to consider my words. You will all, however, understand this: no man gives unless he loves. If I want to give you something, it is because I love you. I _do_ want to give you something. I want to give you myself: my soul. It is yours. Take it.”

He paused. The blank faces of the men and women hurt him. They thought him mad. He could see that many of the people were whispering to each other. Some were even smiling.

“Listen!” he shouted, passionately. “I want to give you myself so that I may prove to you that we are all one--that our souls are one soul. If my soul can depart from my body into your bodies, then you will know that we are, in truth, all one, and that to hate or hurt your neighbour is to hurt and hate yourselves, and that to injure yourselves by wickedness is to injure all the souls in all the world.

“I ask all who love me, and who have understood the words I have spoken, to make themselves ready to receive me.”

With excitement and passion, he attempted to confuse his mind and reduce it to chaos by inviting a multitude of varied thoughts. He stiffened his muscles and opened his eyes to their widest. He willed his soul to depart. Madness painted his face a ghastly white, his features became convulsed, the veins in his forehead stood out horribly....

And now the onlookers stared in fascination. A few murmured with fear and disgust.

For a minute and more Dmitri stood in silence, goading himself on to unrestrainable madness. His mind broke. He began to paw the air with his hands. And then, smiling stupidly, he sat down and played with his fingers.

His disciples rushed upon him.

“The miracle has come to pass!” exclaimed one.

“Poor Dmitri!” said a man who was not a disciple; “he gets worse and worse! His madness is incurable.”

Hundreds of men and woman crowded round him, but Jacques was one of the first to reach his side. With the help of others, he led Dmitri from the crowd and took him home.

* * * * *

A month passed.

Dmitri came downstairs to the room in which Jacques and Madelein were sitting. His face had no meaning. His eyes were empty.

He sat down at the table, and tears began to run down his cheeks.

Jacques stared at him for some little time in profound distress.

“We must get rid of him,” he said, aloud, to Madelein, “if only for your sake.”

“Yes,” answered his wife, sorrowfully; “I can bear him no longer. He must go.”

THE STRANGER

To Adrian L. Burns

When my friend Trevor Hempel disappeared from among all his friends, he left me the following letter:

* * * * *

I am off to Australia to-morrow, and I’m going without saying farewell to any one. It is a choice between my committing murder and leaving Europe for ever. Nature has played me false--has tricked me. Between my wife and me she has placed something monstrous: a “sport” so hideous that to live any longer as a husband would mean a swift corrosion of anything good that is left of me.

I felt, my dear old friend, that I must speak out my mind to some one. It is a selfish feeling. I want to rid myself of the obsession of this wickedness. I want you to share its knowledge with me. The thing is of such a kind that it ought not to have happened. Nature ought not to lie in wait for us and spring out like a baboon from behind a tree. We know Nature is cruel, but not until lately did I know she could be malignant, damnably malignant, looking years ahead, calculating craftily all the time....

It is nine years since I met the woman who afterwards became my wife. I was in Salonika on one of my quarterly business visits. At the house of Madame Leconte de Stran it was that I met Judith for the first time. Her husband was with her: a dark evil man, short, with a great head and depth of chest and long, deformed arms. She was as spiritual as he was gross: very quiet, but full of character, and with a mind both strong and active.

I remember going up to Madame de Stran.

“Who is that woman standing against the piano?” I asked.

“Mrs. Sterling. Don’t you know her?”

At the word “Mrs.” I felt that quick annoyance that sometimes comes to one when one hears for the first time that a woman one admires is married.

“No. Is her husband here?”

She indicated the shambling figure I have described to you.

“That!” I exclaimed. “That evil-looking beast her husband? Impossible!”

Madame de Stran gave me a quick, inquisitive look.

“Professor Sterling,” she said, “is perhaps the most distinguished man of science in Salonika. Why do you call him a beast?”

“Did I? I’m sorry. Tell me more about him.”

“Well, he describes himself as an experimental psychologist. He experiments in hypnotism, vivisects brains, and.... Last year he published in Rome a book that is talked about rather secretly.”

She stopped for a moment, and then laughed.

“All this sounds rather horrible,” she added, “but I suppose it isn’t really. At all events, he is greatly respected here by all men of learning.”

“If an opportunity arises,” I said, “will you introduce me to her? What I mean is, I don’t want the introduction to be conspicuous.”

She nodded and smiled.

“You’ll find her very charming,” she said, as I walked away.

And later on Madame presented me to Judith.

From the very first moment we talked without restraint. But then, as I learned afterwards, she was never restrained with anybody. She was utterly frank and natural; interesting, too; full of curiosity about life.

What appealed to me most in her, I think, was her careful choice of words when discussing any subject that really mattered. Her speech was free from all exaggeration; she never invented opinions on the spur of the moment as so many people do in casual conversation. This pleased and attracted me. But there was something in her that repelled--that kept me at a distance. All the time we talked, I felt that the best part of her--the most exquisite part--was on the other side of the room with her husband. She was not really with me: she was with him. I resented this. I had no right to resent it; but I did. For, already, I was in love with her.

Lovers move craftily. So I sought out her husband and was presented to him. He looked me over carefully.

“You have been talking to my wife,” he observed.

“Yes,” said I. “We have been talking to each other.”

His rather large mouth smiled insincerely.

I felt he had guessed my secret. Certainly, his personality emanated a faint hostility. He turned to Luigi Papash, ... the man who has since become famous as a poet, and began to talk to him. I was dismissed....

You would be bored if I were to describe to you my feverish lover’s restlessness during the next three weeks. I did many foolish things--neglected my business, wandered about alone, and sought every opportunity to be within sight and sound of Judith. I had only to shut my eyes to see _her_ eyes, calm and grey, her pale oval face, her dark hair. She seemed pitiful. My jealousy burned me. It was impossible for me to see her and her husband together without a horrid excitement.... But you know these things: all men feel the same about them.

I learned very little more about her. The previous year, I was told, she had had a child, a baby-boy, who had died when eight months old. She had been married three years. Her husband kept his work hidden from her. He never discussed it, never referred to it. But of their mutual idolatry there was no shadow of doubt. No two people were more essential each to the other; yet (or do I mean because?) they were entirely different.

At the end of three weeks I went back to Athens.

Madame de Stran knew my secret; oh, I suppose every one knew it. Every one except Judith who, absorbed in her husband, never exercised her intuitions with regard to myself. Madame wrote to me occasionally; she was very kind. Just news of Salonika people. And somewhere in each letter would be a sentence: “The Sterlings are still here”; or, “Professor Sterling has just published a pamphlet on ‘The Nature and Origin of Cancer': I am sending you a copy”; or, “When I told Mrs. Sterling I was writing to you, she wished me to send you her remembrances.”

Then, one morning, opening a letter of Madame de Stran’s before I touched any of my other correspondence, I read: “Professor Sterling is seriously ill. They say he has brain fever.”

He would die: I _knew_ it. I prayed that he should. I willed it. I thought of nothing else all day. That detestable, dark man must die. Judith must be released....

“Released”? What arrogant vanity distorts the vision of all lovers! Released? Why, she was happy. Her husband’s brain was not for her a prison: it was the wide world. His enfolding arms were freedom....

That same evening I took the steamer from Le Pirée to Salonika....

I want to describe that night to you, because it was the happiest in my life. You must remember that for a long time I had been suffering under a strain so cruel that my nerves and brain were bruised and quivering. The sea--the stars--space! They brought me solace.

I remember leaning over the rail and looking down at the sea; it was saturated with stars and moonlight. It seemed to me that I became part of what I looked at. Does that convey anything to you? I was released from myself. I had got rid of myself. I had become renewed.... It is impossible, my dear friend, for me to describe what change took place in me for that one night. It was a sudden cessation of pain, a freeing of the soul, an accession of power. Illusion, no doubt--I mean the consciousness of power. If I had been Zeus himself----!

At all events, no sleep came to me that night: I wanted neither sleep nor rest. I was not going to Judith, for Judith already was with me. She was with me more closely that night than she ever was, though I married her. My mind was full of poets’ phrases: “His silver skin laced with his golden blood”: lines from “Annabel Lee”: the “magic casements” of Keats: some stupendous things from Whitman. These did not tease or worry me: they were like the potent delicate fumes of a drug. All life was poetry: there was no possible interpretation of life except the romantic interpretation. Happiness lay not in gathering and garnering beauty, but in surrendering oneself to beauty. And, in a burst, Wagner’s “Tristan” rushed flood-like upon me; I was drowned in its pleasure-pain----

Well, he died. He was dead when I arrived at Salonika. The news gave me no pleasure, for what had happened I had known would happen.

Madame de Stran received me.

“You look ill,” she said; “or perhaps you are tired?”

I made her sit down and tell me all she knew about Judith.

“I wish to God she had never borne him a child!” I said, when she told me she had seen a photograph of the baby taken just before the illness from which it died.

“He was very like his father: dark, misshapen, vulpine,” said Madame.

“Don’t speak of him. The father and the child are dead: only she remains. Has she any close friends in Salonika?”

“No--not one that is very close, though many people like her. She did not make intimacies. You see, her husband absorbed her.”

“And now what will happen?”

Madame told me that she had already written to Judith offering her help: probably a reply to her letter would come in the morning. She promised to summon me if I could be of the slightest use, and with this small comfort I returned to my hotel to brood. Inaction lay so heavily upon me that it was scarcely to be endured. I wanted to help--to _be_ something to her.

That night I lay awake in dark dejection. In those days I was not used to suffering, to anxiety. At length I slept....

Day after day I stayed on, hoping to be summoned, Madame de Stran giving me all the comfort she could. He was buried. Judith shut herself up in her house! At night I would walk from my hotel towards Kalamaria and, in the complete darkness, wander in the garden surrounding her home. I remember that I used to touch the flowers with my fingers. I used to put my foot on the pathway and say to myself: “_Her_ foot has been there!” The garden was magical with remembrances of her. Yet she was absent, and the ache in me grew and grew. My eyes used to become hot with unshed tears. Though it was torture to linger there, yet I could never draw myself away until very late, and one night, sitting down on a bank, I fell asleep. As I woke, the scent of dew-laden roses weakened me unmercifully; and I sobbed without tears....

I must tell you all this: it matters: it is the heart of the tragedy that has happened to me: that, and the remembrance of her brute-husband who so wickedly, so monstrously, still lives in my son....

One night, while in her garden, I saw her. I was standing in a little grove of pepper-trees. She came slowly towards me. I stepped back to conceal myself. Her little feet on the grass made no sound. What were her thoughts? Oh, of him--him whom she had loved and was still loving. It was he who for her haunted this garden, not I. If my body had been multiplied a hundred-fold and all my hundred bodies were hiding there in the trees, she would have felt nothing. She passed and repassed, and then disappeared into the gloom of the house.

At length, under the implacable pressure of my own self-torture, I wrote to her. I told her I knew of her grief, that.... In short, I asked to be allowed to come and see her.

Months later, she told me that my letter had terrified her. Some phrases in it had called up many dead memories and, pondering, she had seen in a flash that I loved her. Her spirit was too sore even for sympathy, and offering her love was like offering her an unsheathed sword. My letter brought no answer, and two days later Madame de Stran told me mournfully that Judith had left Salonika for Constantinople....

Four months passed; to me, working in Athens, they were four years. I did not deceive myself by telling myself I would try to forget her: no man ever tries to forget the woman he loves. Madame de Stran wrote occasionally, promising, and repeating her promise in each letter, that she would tell me as soon as she received news of Judith’s return. My business prospered: you know, I have always been successful. I threw myself into my work, and exhausted my false, feverish energy by violent exercise. I rode my horse an hour each day: I swam: I walked: and, occasionally, I sought the baleful comfort of drink.

September came and went. Then in October I was visited by a mood of such unremitting desperateness that I suddenly stopped my work and my violent exercise. I felt incapable of any action, for I had exhausted all my energy. I had used up my capacity for suffering; I could feel neither pain nor pleasure. For days I sat stupidly in my office, staring at nothing. I closed my door to all visitors; I transacted no business; I answered no letters.

Then, one morning, as I was moodily pacing up and down my private room, a clerk entered with a telegram. Idly I tore open the envelope and read its contents. It was from Madame--just one word, “Come.” But that word meant everything: it changed the whole world for me....

Two days later I was in Salonika. I did not wait even to call on Madame de Stran, but went straight to Judith’s house.

It was early afternoon. I was admitted. The room into which I was shown was empty. Already greatly agitated, I felt my excitement increasing almost beyond bounds whilst I waited. What should I say when she entered? Would she still be thrall to her dead husband? Would his personality still envelop hers and obscure it?

She entered so silently that, though my eyes were fixed on the door, I scarcely realized she was there. A swift searching of her face told me she was well.

She was courteous, she was kind; but she was timid. She spoke of her friends in Constantinople.

“I have been very busy with my work,” she said, smiling.

As she looked at me it seemed to me that she was doing everything possible to be gentle with me; it was as though she knew she had the power to hurt me, and was afraid that some chance word might wound.

“Work?” I asked.

“Yes. My husband left his last book half finished--a great mass of notes, and a rough synopsis of each chapter. I wrote the book as he wished it to be written. He helped me all the time.”

“He _helped_ you!” I exclaimed, shocked.

“Yes. You do not believe in communication with the dead? He did not speak to me, it is true, but he guided me.”