Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

He did not fall down, his heart did not burst asunder,--it was too young and strong. Having stood for a minute or so, he sat down on the ground, under an age-old fig-tree, whose entire top, like a tree of paradise, burned and flickered with the dust of fiery-green sparks. For a long time did he gaze upon the dark round little head, upon the red silk that loosely embraced the little body, and upon the arms, raised as she patted her hairdress, of her who stood framed in the window. He squatted on his heels until she had turned about and had gone into the recesses of the room. And when she had disappeared he instantly jumped to his feet, caught the shafts that had been lying on the ground, and flew like a bird through the yard and out of the gates; again did he start running, on and on,--this time knowing unerringly whither he was running, and wherefore, and now himself directing his suddenly liberated will.

“Awake, awake!” clamoured within him the thousands of soundless voices of his mournful ancestors, mouldered for hundreds of generations in this paradisaical earth. “Shake off thee the seductions of Mara, the dream of this brief life! Is sleep for thee,--thou who hast been empoisoned with venom, pierced through with an arrow! An hundredfold doth he suffer who hath that which is an hundredfold dear; all sorrows, all complaints, come from love, from the attachments of the heart,--therefore, slay thou them! Not for long shalt thou be in the tranquillity of rest; anew and anew, in a thousand incarnations, shalt thou be put forth by this thy land of Eden, the shelter of the first men who had come to know desire. But still this brief rest shall come to thee, thou that hast too early run forth upon the path of life, passionately setting out after happiness, and that hast been wounded by the sharpest of all arrows,--by the yearning for love and for new inceptions in this ancient universe, where from time out of mind the conqueror stands with a heavy sole upon the throat of the conquered!”

The lights of the open air stalls of Slave Island appeared under the canopies of the trees whose tops were interlaced. The rickshaw-man hungrily ate in one of these stalls a small bowl of rice over-spiced with pepper, and then darted on. He knew where the old man from Madura lived, who had an hour ago entered the yard of the hotel: he dwelt with his nephew, at his large fruit store, in a low house with wooden columns. The nephew, in a dirty European suit of duck, with an enormous mane of black twining wool upon his head, was dragging in the baskets of fruits into the interior of the store, his eyes puckering from the smoke of a cigarette that had stuck to his lower lip. He paid no attention to the insane appearance of the perspiring, heated rickshaw-man. And the rickshaw-man silently hopped up under the shelter of the awning, among the pillars, went to the left, and with his foot pushed a small door behind which he hoped to find the old mute. In his perspiring hand he was clutching a treasured gold-piece, which, while he was still running, he had taken out of a leather pouch that hung at his belt, beneath his apron. And the gold-piece speedily did its work. When the rickshaw-man jumped out again, he bore a large cigar box, tied with a cord. He had paid a great price for it, but then, it was not empty: that which it contained was struggling, writhing, knocking against the lid with its tensed coils, swishingly.

Why did he take the little carriage along with him? For take it along he did,--and at an even, powerful pace flew for the shore of the ocean, toward Gull Face Place. The place was empty; darkly did it extend into the distance under the light of the stars. Beyond it were scattered the small and infrequent lights of the Fort, and against the sky was slowly turning the watch-tower of the lighthouse, with its reflectors, throwing fumid stripes of white light in the direction of the roadstead only. The rickshaw-man felt a faint cool breeze blowing from the ocean, whose drowsy murmur was barely audible. Having reached at a run the shore, the middle of the road, the rickshaw-man for the last time threw down the slender shafts, into which at such an early age, but not for long, life had harnessed him, and sat down,--this time not upon the ground, but on a bench; sat down without fear, as though he were a white resident.

In giving a whole pound to the Hindu, he had demanded the smallest and the strongest, the most death-bearing one. And it was,--besides having a faery beauty, being all in black rings, with green edgings, with a dark blue rounded head, with an emerald stripe back of its head, and with a funereal tail,--it was, despite its small size, unusually powerful and malignant; but now, after it had been coiled up in a smelly wooden box, it was especially so. It coiled convulsively, like a steel spring; it writhed, rustled, and knocked against the lid of the box. And he rapidly untied, unwound the cord.... However, who knows just how he did it? Were his hands steady, or did they tremble? Was he rapid, resolute, or no? And did he waver long after untying the cord? Did he gaze for long at the murmurous dark ocean, upon the faint starlight, upon the Southern Cross, the Crow, upon Canopus? Did he bare his teeth in a canine snarl in the direction of the residential quarter, in the direction of the rich hotel with its entrance shining in the distance? Most probably, he had at once unhesitatingly opened the box, and had laid his left hand firmly upon those springy coils, icy as a dead body, that were writhing in the box; he was bitten right in the palm.

And that bite is intolerably searing,--it is like the shock of an electric current, and transpierces a man’s entire body with untold pain, with such torture that after feeling it even monkeys cry out piteously and burst into sobs,--childish, passionate, despairingly-imploring. The rickshaw-man, most probably, did neither cry out nor burst into sobs; full well did he know what he had set out to do. But there is no doubt that, having felt this fiery shock, he turned a pin-wheel on the bench, and that the box flew aside. And then, instantly, a bottomless darkness spread out beneath him, and all things darted off somewhere upward, obliquely: the ocean, and the stars, and the lights of the hotel. The surging of the ocean went to his head,--and ceased abruptly: a dead faint always occurs after such a shock. But after such a faint a man always comes quickly to himself,--seemingly only to be nauseated, until blood comes, and to be again plunged into non-being. There are several of these death-swoons, and each one of them, breaking a man, making him gasp, tears away human life, in parts; thought, memory, vision, hearing, pain, grief, joy, hatred,--and that ultimate, all-embracing thing which is called love, the yearning to encompass within one’s heart all the universe, seen and unseen, and to bestow it anew upon some other.

* * * * *

Some ten days later, on a dark, sultry dusk before a thunder-storm, two pair of oarsmen were racing in a small boat through the harbour of Colombo, toward a great Russian steamship that was about to sail for Suez. The passenger whom rickshaw-man number seven had once carried was half-reclining in the boat. The steamer was already booming with the rattling of the rising anchor chain, when, getting near the enormous iron wall of the ship’s side, he ran up the long trap-ladder to the deck. The captain at first flatly refused to take him on board: the steamer carried freight only, he declared; the agent had already gone away,--the thing was impossible. “But I beg you,--very, very much!” retorted the Englishman. The captain looked at him with wonder; he was apparently strong, energetic, but there was the tint of an unwholesome tan upon his face, while the eyes behind the glistening spectacles were unmoving, seeming to see nothing, and perturbed. “Wait until the day after to-morrow,” said the captain; “there will be a German mail-packet then.” “Yes, but to spend two more nights at Colombo would be very hard for me,” answered the Englishman. “This climate exhausts me,--my nerves trouble me. Besides that, the German packet, as is always the case, will be packed to overflowing, whereas I desire to be alone. I am done up by these Ceylon nights, by insomnia, and by all that which a nervous man experiences before thunder-storms at dusk. But just glance at this darkness, at these clouds that have obscured the horizon everywhere: the night will again be a horrible one, the rain season has, properly speaking, already set in....” And, with a shrug of his shoulders, upon reflection, the captain gave in. And a minute later the Senegalese, thin as eels, were already dragging up the trap-ladder a trunk covered with shining black leather, all gay with vari-coloured labels and marked with red initials.

The surgeon’s vacant cabin, which was put at the disposal of the Englishman, was very small and stuffy; but the Englishman found it splendid. Having hurriedly disposed his things about it, he passed through the dining cabin up to the deck. Everything was rapidly sinking in the darkness. The ship had already weighed anchor and was heading for the open sea. To the right, other ships, with lights on their masts, seemed to be sailing toward them,--these were the lights of the Fort. To the left, under the high taffrail, the shifting level expanse of the dark water rushed toward the low shore, toward the mounds of coal, and the dark density of the groves of slender trunked palms that were beyond the coal mounds. The water still bounded the darkness and the mournfulness of the clouds, and its shifting rapidity made one’s head reel. Constantly veering, constantly increasing, a humid, nauseatingly-fragrant wind was blowing from somewhere. The taciturn clouds suddenly burst into such an abysmal pale-blue light, that, lit up by it, in the very depth of the forest, the trunks of the palms and bananas, and the Senegalese huts underneath them, flashed upon the vision. The Englishman blinked in affright; he looked over his shoulder upon the pallid jetty with the little red light at the end of it, by now seemingly sailing upon his left; he looked at the leaden-hued ocean in the distance, beyond the jetty,--and quickly started back for his cabin.

The old steward, a man irritated with fatigue, needlessly suspicious and observant, peeped in several times behind the curtain of the Englishman’s cabin before dinner. The Englishman was sitting on a folding canvas chair, holding a thick leather-bound note-book on his knees. He was writing in it with a gold-tipped pen, and his expression, whenever he raised his face, his spectacles flashing, was dull, and, at the same time, wondering. Then, having put his pen away, he went off into a brown study, as though he were listening to the surging and swishing of the waves, ponderously rushing by on the other side of the cabin wall. The steward passed by, swinging a clamorous little bell. The Englishman got up and stripped himself naked. Having sponged himself off with water and eau-de-cologne from head to foot, he shaved, clipped evenly his short, bushy moustache, painstakingly smoothed down with military brushes his straight black hair, parting it at a slant, put on fresh linen and his dinner jacket, and went to dinner with his habitual firm, soldierly bearing.

The ship’s personnel, who had long since been seated at table and had been swearing at him for his lateness, met him with exaggerated politeness, showing off before one another with their knowledge of English. He responded with a restrained, but not a lesser, politeness, and hastened to add that he liked the Russian cuisine very much, that he had been in Russia, in Siberia.... That, in general, he had travelled a great deal, and had always borne up splendidly on his travels, which, however, could not be said of his last stay in India, in Java and Ceylon; here his liver was affected, his nerves were upset,--he had even come to eccentricities: such, for example, as that which he had shown an hour ago when he had so suddenly appeared on the steamer.... At coffee he regaled the ship’s men with cognac and _liqueurs_; he fetched a box of thick Egyptian cigarettes and put it on the table, open, for common use. The captain, a man still young, with clever and steady eyes, who endeavoured to be a European in all things, began a conversation about the colonial problems of Europe, about the Japanese, about the future of the Far East. Listening attentively, the Englishman objected or agreed. He spoke well, and not at all with simplicity, but as though he were reading aloud from a well-written article. And at times he would suddenly grow quiet, still more attentively trying to catch the swish of the waves beyond the open door. The thunderstorm had been left behind. Long since the chain of Colombo’s lights, that for a long while had been playing like diamonds, had sunk into black velvet. Now the steamer was in infinite darkness, in the void of ocean and of night. The dining cabin was situated on deck, under the captain’s bridge, and the darkness was etched in an intense black within the open doors and windows: it seemed to be standing and gazing in into the brightly lit dining room. A humid breeze blew out of this darkness,--the humid, free breath of a something free since the start of time,--and its freshness, reaching those seated at table, made them feel the odour of the tobacco smoke, of the hot coffee, and of the liqueurs. But at times the electric light would suddenly fail,--the doors and the windows then became gleaming pale blue quadrangles; the blue abyss of abysses, noiseless and unutterably expansive, spread out around the steamer; the running swell of the watery spaces gleamed; the horizons were flooded with a blackness as of coal,--and thence, like the grievous murmur of the Creator Himself, still plunged in primordial chaos, came to their ears the roll of thunder,--muffled, sombre and triumphant, shaking all things to their foundation. And at such times the Englishman seemed to be frozen on the spot for a moment.

“This is really frightful!” said he in his lifeless but steady voice after a flash especially blinding. And, getting up from his place, he walked up to the door that gaped into the darkness. “Very frightful,” said he, as though he were talking to himself. “And the most frightful thing of all is that we do not think, do not feel, and cannot, have forgotten how to feel the full frightfulness of this.”

“What, precisely?” asked the captain.

“Why, just this for example,” answered the Englishman, “that under us and around us is that bottomless depth, that shifting trough of the sea of which the Bible speaks with such awesomeness.... Oh,” said he sternly, looking intently into the darkness, “both far and near, everywhere, the furrows of foam flare up, flaming with green, and the darkness surrounding this foam is lilac-black, the colour of a raven’s wing.... Is it a very eerie thing to be a captain?” he asked gravely.

“Why no, not at all,” answered the captain with assumed nonchalance. “It’s a tiresome business, and responsible, but, in reality not very complicated.... It is all a matter of habit....”

“Better say,--of our callousness,” said the Englishman. “To be standing there, up on your bridge, at whose sides these two great eyes,--the green and the red,--look out, blurred, through their thick glass, and to be sailing somewhere into the darkness of night and water, extending for thousands of miles around,--it is madness! But, however, it is no better,” he added, again glancing out of the door, “it is no better, on the other hand, to be lying below in a cabin, beyond whose exceedingly thin wall, near your very head, beats and rolls this bottomless deep.... Yes, yes,--our reason is just as feeble as the reason of a mole; or, rather, still more feeble, for in the case of a mole, of an animal, of a savage, instinct, at least, has been preserved; whereas with us, with Europeans, it has degenerated, is degenerating!”

“However, moles do not navigate over the entire terrestrial globe,” answered the captain smiling. “Moles do not enjoy the benefits of steam, of electricity, of wireless telegraphy. Do you wish to hear me speak with Aden right now? And yet it is a ten days’ sail from here.”

“And that, too, is frightful,” said the Englishman, and cast a stern glance through his spectacles at one of the engineers who had started laughing. “Yes, that too is very frightful. For we, in reality, do not fear anything. We do not fear even death properly: neither life, nor sacred mysteries, nor the depths that surround us, nor death,--neither our death nor that of others! I am a colonel of the British Army, a participant of the Boer War; I, commanding cannons to be fired, used to kill men in hundreds; and here I am, not only neither suffering nor going out of my mind because I am a murderer, but never even thinking of these hundreds.”

“What about the beasts, and the savages,--do they think of such things?” asked the captain.

“The savages believe that things have to be so, whereas we don’t,” said the Englishman, and became silent; he started pacing the dining room, trying to step as firmly as he could in his dancing shoes.

The flashes of the distant thunder storm, gleaming roseately over the stars, were by now decreasing. The wind blowing through the windows and doors was stronger and cooler, the impenetrable darkness beyond the door surged more loudly. A large sea-shell that served as an ash-tray was sliding upon the table. Under one’s feet, growing unpleasantly weaker, one felt something gathering force below, lifting one up, then falling over on one side, spreading out,--and the floor fell deeper and deeper from under one’s feet. The ship’s men, having finished their coffee and smoked their fill, sat in silence for several minutes more, casting glances at their queer passenger; then, wishing him good-night, they began picking up their caps. The captain alone stayed on,--he was smoking and following the Englishman with his eyes. The Englishman, with a cigar, was walking, swayingly, from door to door; his dark complexion, his spectacles, and his seriousness combined with absent-mindedness, irritated the old steward, who was clearing the table.

“Yes, yes,” said the Englishman, “there is only one thing frightful to us,--that we have forgotten how to feel fear! There is no God, no religion in Europe, long since; we, with all our business activity and greed, are as cold as ice both toward life and toward death. Even if we do fear death, it is with our reason or only with the remnants of an animal instinct. At times we even try to inspire ourself with that dread, to exaggerate it,--and still we do not respond, do not feel in due measure those incomprehensible and horrible things of which the life of man is full.... Just as I, even I, do not now feel that which I myself have called fearful,” said he, pointing toward the open door, beyond which the impenetrable darkness murmured, by now raising high the prow, and tumbling the ship, all of whose partitions were creaking, from one side to the other.

“It is Ceylon that has affected you so,” said the captain mechanically.

“Oh, beyond a doubt, beyond a doubt!” agreed the Englishman. “We all,--commercial men, mechanical engineers, military men, politicians, colonizers,--we all, fleeing from our own dullness and vanity, wander all the world over; for you will agree that the number of travelling Europeans is increasing with a magic rapidity; that the entire terrestrial globe is plastered over with motley placards and time-tables. And we try with all our might to be enraptured, now with the mountains and lakes of Switzerland, now with the pauperism of Italy,--her pictures and the broken-up fragments of her statues and columns. Or we wander over the slippery stones which have survived from some amphitheatres in Sicily, or we gaze with simulated delight upon the yellow heaps of rubble at the Acropolis in Greece; or attend, as though it were some show-booth spectacle at a fair, the distribution of the sacred fire in Jerusalem. We pay sums unheard of in order to undergo tortures from guides and fleas in the tombs and clay idol-temples of Egypt. We sail to India, to China, to Japan,--and it is only here, upon the soil of the most ancient of mankind, in this Eden which we have forfeited, which we style our colonies and which we covetously despoil, in the midst of squalor, bubonic plague, cholera, fevers, and coloured races whom we have turned into cattle,--only here do we feel, in some slight measure, life, death, godhood. Here, after having remained indifferent toward all these Osirises, Zeuses, Appolons, toward Christ, toward Mahomet, have I more than once felt that I might perhaps have bowed only before them,--these fearful Gods of this cradle of mankind: before the hundred-armed Brahma; before Siva; before the Devil; before Buddha, whose word verily rang forth like the utterance of Methuselah himself, driving nails into the coffin-lid of the universe.... Yes, thanks only to the East, and to the diseases contracted in the East; thanks to the fact that in Africa I slaughtered men by the hundreds; that in India, which is being despoiled by England, and, therefore, in part by me, I have seen thousands dying from hunger; that I had bought little girls in Japan to be my wives for a month; that in China I had beaten defenseless, simian old men over their heads with a stick; that in Java and Ceylon I had driven rickshaw-men until I heard the death rattle in their throats; that I had, in my time, contracted a most cruel fever in Anaradhapore, and liver trouble on the shore of Malabar,--only thanks to all this do I still feel and think, after a fashion. Those lands, those countless peoples, which still either live a life of infantile immediacy, sentient with all their beings of existence, and death, and the divine majesty of the universe; or those lands and peoples which have already traversed a long and arduous path (historical, religious and philosophical), and who have grown wearied on this path,--such lands and peoples we, the men of the new age of iron, aspire to enslave, to divide amongst us, and this we style our colonial problems. And when this division shall come to an end, then on this world will again be enthroned the might of some new Tyre or Sidon, a new Rome, English or German. There will be repeated, inevitably repeated, also that which had been prophesied by Judæan prophets to Sidon, that, according to the word of the Bible, had grown to deem itself God; that which had been prophesied to Rome by the Apocalypse; and to India, to the Aryan tribes that had enslaved it, by Buddha, who has said, ‘O ye princes, ye men in power, rich in treasures, who have arrayed your covetousness against one another, insatiably pandering to your lusts! ...’ Buddha understood the significance of the life of Individuality in this ‘world of having been,’ in this universe, whose meaning we cannot attain to, and he was horrified with a sacred horror. Whereas we exalt our Individuality above the heavens; we want to centre all the world within it, no matter what may be said of the coming universal brotherhood and equality. And so it is only on the ocean, under stars new and foreign to us, in the midst of the majesty of tropical thunder storms; or in India, in Ceylon, where history is so immeasurable, where at times one glimpses life veritably primitive, and where on dark, sultry nights, in the fevered gloom, one feels man melting, dissolving in this blackness, in these sounds, scents, in this fearful All-Oneness,--only there do we in a slight measure grasp the meaning of this our pitiful Individuality.... Do you know,” said he, halting again, and flashing his spectacles at the captain, “a certain Buddhistic legend?”

“Which one?” asked the captain, who had already yawned surreptitiously and had glanced at his watch.

“Why, this: A raven darted after an elephant who was running down a wooded mountain toward the sea; wrecking all things in his path, breaking down the overgrowths, the elephant plunged into the waves,--and the raven, tortured by ‘desire,’ fell after him, and, having waited until the elephant had swallowed enough water to kill himself and had floated up on the waves, descended on the carcass with its great ears; the carcass floated on, putrefying, while the raven greedily pecked away at it; but when he came to his senses, he saw that he had been borne far, far from land,--to a distance from which there is no return even upon the wings of a gull,--and he began cawing in a piteous voice, that voice for which Death waits so warily.... It is a terrible legend!”

“Yes, it is very significant,” said the captain, indifferently.

The Englishman lapsed into silence and again began pacing from door to door. From the surging darkness faintly floated in the sounds of the second bell, abrupt and, as is always the case on the ocean, plaintive. The captain, after having sat for five minutes more out of politeness, got up, shook the Englishman’s hand, and went off to his big, restful cabin. The Englishman, reflecting upon something, continued pacing. The steward, having endured for half an hour more in the pantry, entered and with an angry face began switching off the electricity, leaving only one bulb lit. The Englishman, when the steward had disappeared, walked up to the wall and turned off this bulb as well. Darkness descended at once, the surging of the waves at once appeared louder, and the starry sky, the masts, the sail-yards at once appeared in the open windows. The steamer creaked and clambered from one watery mountain to another. It swung wider and wider, rising and falling,--and in its rigging Canopus, the Crow, the Southern Cross swayed widely to and fro, now flying toward the abyss above, now toward the abyss below, and roseate auroras were still flashing above them.

_1914._

GAUTAMI

This is a tale thrice beautiful in its brevity and unpretentiousness, its meaning and the manner of its telling; a tale of the love of Gautami, the saintly and the beatified, who, without knowing it herself, did come under the sheltering shadow of the Blessed One.

Thus have we heard it told:

In a populous hamlet, in a felicitous region, at the foot of the great Himalayas, in a family poor but worthy, was Gautami born.

She was tall of stature and rather lean at first sight; swarthy and pleasant of face was she, and simple and unpretentious of soul,--therefore did the neighbours bestow an unkind by-name upon her. “Gautami the Lean” did they nickname her, but she took no offense thereat. And every order did she obey, and to every order she made such answer as:

“’Tis well, dear master; I shall do so. ’Tis well, dear mistress, I shall do so.”

For may plain speech be forgiven us,--not of the wisest among men and women was Gautami. But neither did she utter anything foolish,--perhaps because she did not say much, and laboured at something from morning till night. And the raiment upon her was always poor, and always, always the same, but always neat. And so one day a youth, truly rich and handsome, the son of the great king of that region, did behold her upon a river bank, when she was washing the linen of her sisters and brothers, and he comprehended that she was sensible and submissive, and that there was none to take her part,--not even her parents.

Thus did he think:

“‘There is no help for it,’ her parents will say; ‘Gautami is not of the wisest, Gautami is not pretty to look upon; she does not resemble a daughter of ours, but rather a servant,--who shall take her to wife? Sooner or later, she shall submit to some man who may desire her,--for Gautami is incapable of refusing. Ah, if only this man prove not without pity, and will give away, to be rightly brought up, the child that will be born of her!’”

Thus did the king’s son think.

As for Gautami, having washed and rinsed the linen, she squatted down upon her heels over the water glistening in the sun; having taken off all her raiment, she did swathe all her body from the arm-pits to the knees in an old piece of cloth, and, having spread her long black hair, began to clean her white teeth with a wetted, splintered little stick, began to wash her swarthy limbs, not knowing that the king’s son was watching her from behind the clumps of bamboo. And thereupon he did call out to her, and, walking up to her, told her with a smile, yet not unkindly:

“Thou art endearing, Gautami, and not at all as lean as they say you are,--a maid clad in simple raiment, and of tall stature, is often misjudged. I have heard, Gautami, that thou art submissive. Do not resist me, therefore; none shall see our caresses at this sultry hour, near the deserted river.”

And Gautami was abashed before him, before his assurances that his wishes were righteous, and she did whisper in answer:

“’Tis well, dear master; let it be as thou dost will.”

And the king’s son, having had his joyance of her, saw that she was better than she had seemed, and that her dark eyes, although they were not expressive of thought, and somehow seemed always the same, were never the less full of enchantment. And after that their meetings upon the bank of the river, within the grove of bamboos, became frequent, and so it was that, whenever the king’s son would order Gautami to come to him, she always would come, never disobeying; nor did her submissiveness and charm change with the intimacy of their bodies; nor her agreeable manner when their conversation was brief. And when the ordained time had run, she felt herself heavy with child.

Thereupon did the king’s son take her as one of his concubines, transferring her with her poor little kit, wherein she kept her modest belongings, the sorry savings of a maiden who works, into his opulent palace, and she lived in the palace until her time was come.

And when her day had approached, one of the king’s stewardesses did say to her:

“Gautami! A wife who is about to become a mother goeth to the house of her father to give birth, in fulfillment of the custom. But thou art no wife, but a concubine. Go not therefore to the house of thy parents; but also do not thou transgress against that which is seemly.”

And Gautami, having salaamed before her, got up, and went out of the gate of the clay walls that enclosed the palace.

And, having passed over the wooden bridge that spanned a muddy canal, which was near by, she saw one who sat under a tree, with a bowl in his hand,--a blind and an ancient beggar, girt only about his middle with a dirty rag, whereas his arms, his legs, his bosom and his withered, glistening back he had exposed to the blazing sun and the flies.

And the beggar raised his sightless face, hearkening to her steps, and he smiled with the tender and poignant smile of the wisdom of old men.

“Gautami!” spake he to her. “I see thee not but I feel thy approach. Gautami, may thy path be blessed!”

And she kissed the knee of the beggar and went on upon her way; and upon her way, in the hot, sun-filled groves, among the satin trees, she did give birth to her child before its time.

And blissfully, having rested with tears of happiness after her sore travail, she returned with the child in her arms into the palace of the prince and gave full rein to her ceaseless ecstasy and tender delight, to an emotion of bodily love for the new-born, to the delectable disquiet of seeing, scenting, touching, and pressing to her bosom this growing being, that with every day became more and more awake to thought and consciousness.

“My soul hath recalled thee!”--these words had not been uttered by the prince to Gautami when he had become as one with her, even though she had been dear to him, even though they had borne her to the palace of the king with music, upon bullocks adorned with ribbands and flowers, having arrayed her as for a bridal, dressing her black hair smoothly, putting rouge on her cheeks, and blackening her eye-lashes with kohl.

And Gautami, having given birth to the child, received submissively the youth’s having grown cold toward her, and removed herself from his sight, that he might not feel troubled and guilty upon meeting her by chance.

And, remaining within the enclosure of the palace, she settled in a simple hut on the banks of the ponds, taking upon herself the duty of feeding the swans that swam in those ponds among the grasses and flowers.

And for a time she was happy, preparing, without herself knowing it, for those great sorrows which were destined to come in ordained replacement of this happiness, and to put her upon the sole true path, into the society of the religious brotherhood of those that go clad in yellow.

Blessed are the meek at heart, who have riven their chain.

In an abode of the highest joy do we dwell, who love nothing in this universe, and like to a bird are we, that beareth nothing with it but its wings.

_1919._

THE SON

Mme. Marot had been born and had grown up in Lausanne, in a strict, honest, and industrious family. She did not marry early, but when she did, hers was a love match. In the March of 1876, among the passengers of the old French steamer _Auvergne_, sailing from Marseilles to Italy, was a newly married couple. The days were calm, cool; the sea, all silvery mirrors, lost itself in the misty spring distances; the newly-married couple scarcely ever left the deck. And all admired them, all beheld their happiness with amiable smiles: he showed his happiness in an alert, keen glance, in the necessity for motion, in an animated amiability to all those around him; she, by that joyous interest, with which she assimilated every trifle.... This newly married pair was the Marots.

He was some ten years her senior; he was short in height, swarthy of face, with curly hair; his hand was thin, and his voice sonorous. But in her one sensed an admixture of some blood other than that of the Latins. She seemed just the least trifle too tall, although her waist was splendid; though her hair was dark, her eyes were a grayish blue. They travelled through Naples, Palermo and Tunis to the Algerian town of Constantine, where Monsieur Marot had obtained a rather prominent appointment. And life in Constantine those fourteen years which had passed since that happy spring, had given them everything with which people are usually content: a competance, domestic harmony, healthy and handsome children.

During these fourteen years the Marots had changed very much in appearance: his face had become as black as an Arab’s, he had grown gray and dried up from work, from travelling, from tobacco, and from the sun,--many took him for a native of Algeria; nor would any one have recognized her as the woman who had been a passenger upon the steamer _Auvergne_: then, even in the shoes she put outside the door at night, there had been the enchantment of youth; now she too had glints of silver in her hair, her skin had grown finer and more aureate, her hands had become thinner, and in her care of them, in the dressing of her hair, in her linen, in her apparel, she already betrayed a certain superfluous nicety. Their relations had changed as well, of course, although none would have said that it was for the worse. And each one led an individual existence: his time was taken up with work,--he still remained as passionate, and, at the same time, as sober a man as he had been before; she had to take care of him, of the children--two very pretty girls, of whom the elder was by now almost a young lady,--and everybody unanimously declared that there was not in all Constantine a better housekeeper, a better mother, or a more charming person to chat with in a drawing room, than Mme. Marot.

Their house stood on a quiet and clean street. From the second story, out of the front rooms, always in semi-darkness on account of the closed Venetian blinds, could be seen Constantine, famed all over the world for its picturesqueness: this ancient Arabian stronghold, which had become a French city, lies upon sloping crags. The windows of the living rooms, shady and cool, looked out upon the garden,--there, in a perpetual blaze and glare, dozed age-old eucalypti, sycamores, palms, behind their enclosures of high walls. The master of the house frequently absented himself on matters connected with his work. As for the mistress, she led that confined existence to which, in the colonies, the wives of all Europeans are condemned. On Sundays she invariably attended church. On week days she rarely went out and restricted herself to a small, choice circle. She read, busied herself with embroidery, chatted with the children or took part in their lessons; sometimes, putting the dark-eyed Marie, her younger daughter, on her knees, and playing on the pianoforte with one hand, she would sing old-fashioned French songs, to make the long African day seem shorter, while the hot wind entered in a flood from the garden through the wide-open windows.... Constantine, under the pitiless blaze of the sun and with all its shutters closed, seemed at these hours a dead city: only the roller-birds called out behind the walls of the gardens, and plaintively, with the nostalgia of colonial lands, sounded the trumpets of the buglers on the knolls beyond the city, where at times the cannons made the earth shake with a dull rumble, and one saw the white helmets of the soldiers twinkling.

The days in Constantine passed monotonously, but no one ever remarked that Mme. Marot was oppressed by this. In her character, exquisite and chaste, never appeared any heightened sensitiveness, nor any surplus nervousness. Her health could not be called robust, but it never caused any alarm to Monsieur Marot. Only one incident had struck him: once, in Tunis, an Arab magician had put her so rapidly into a profound sleep, that she had great difficulty in coming back to herself. But this had been still at the time of their journey from France; since that time she had not experienced any such sharp declines of will power, any such unwholesome susceptibility. And Monsieur Marot was happy, tranquil, and convinced that her soul was undisturbed and like an open book to him. And so it really was, even during the last--the fourteenth--year of his domestic life.... But now there appeared in Constantine a certain Emile du Buys.

Emile du Buys, son of Mme. Bonnet, an old and close friend of the Marots, was only nineteen years of age. Mme. Bonnet, the widow of an engineer, had also a daughter, Eliza, besides Emile, who was born of the first marriage. He had grown up in Paris and was already reading law; but, above all, he was taken up with the composition of verses which were comprehensible to him alone, and had attached himself to a non-existent school of poetry, “The Seekers.” In the May of 1889 Eliza was preparing for the altar, but took sick and died a few days after. Emile, who had never up to now been in Constantine, had come for the funeral. It is easy to understand how touched Mme. Marot was by this death,--this death of a girl who was already trying on the bridal veil; everyone also knows how under such circumstances intimacy is established even between people who have scarce come to know one another. In addition, Emile was in reality only a boy to Mme. Marot. Shortly after the funeral, Mme. Bonnet went to France, to her relatives. Emile remained in Constantine, at the suburban county house of his late stepfather,--at the Villa Hassim, as it was called in the town,--and began to visit the Marots almost daily. No matter what sort of a chap he may have been, or whatever he may have pretended to be, he was, never the less, very young, very sensitive, and had need of people with whom he might seek shelter for a time. “And isn’t it strange,” said some, “Mme. Marot has become unrecognizable! How animated she has become; how she has improved in looks!”

However, these allusions were unfounded. At first all it amounted to was that her existence became a trifle gayer, and that her girls became more playful and coquettish, for Emile, every minute forgetting his grief and that virus with which, as he thought, the _fin de siècle_ had envenomed him, fussed for hours at a time with them, altogether as their equal. Of course he was, after all, a man, a Parisian, and not altogether of an ordinary nature; he had participated in that life which Parisian writers lead, so inaccessible to common mortals; frequently, with a certain somnambulistic expressiveness, he would read strange but sonorous verses; and, perhaps, it was precisely thanks to him that the step of Mme. Marot became lighter and quicker, her house apparel just the least trifle smarter, and the nuances of her voice kindlier and more mocking; there may have been, after all, a drop of purely feminine joy in her soul over the fact that here was a man whom it was possible to lord it over somewhat, with whom it was possible to speak with a half jesting sententiousness, with that freedom which was so naturally permitted by the difference in their years. And also over the fact that here was one who was so devoted to her entire household,--where, however, the first person for him (this, of course was revealed very quickly) was still none other than she. But then, how commonplace all this is! Yet for the most part he was merely pitiful to her.

He, who sincerely deemed himself a poet born, wanted to resemble a poet in appearance as well; he wore his hair long, and tossed back; he dressed with an artistic sobriety; he had fine brown hair, which went well with his pale face, just as his black clothes did; but this pallor was too anæmic, with a yellow tinge; his eyes glittered constantly, but, because of his enervated face, they seemed feverish; and his chest was so thin and flat, his legs were so thin, his hands so bony, that one became somewhat ill at ease when he would grow immoderately lively and would run through the street or garden, bending somewhat forward, as though he were sliding, in order to hide his defect,--he had one leg shorter than the other. In society he was disagreeable, supercilious; he tried to be enigmatic, negligent; or, at times, exquisitely impertinent, audacious, at others disdainfully absent-minded and independent in all things; but only too frequently he did not sustain his rôles to the end,--he would forget his part and begin speaking with a certain naïve candour and impulsiveness. And, of course, he could not manage to hide his feelings for long, to dissemble as an unbeliever in love and happiness on this earth: the entire house soon knew of his being in love. He had already begun to bore the master of the house with his visits; he began to bring, every day, bouquets of the rarest flowers from his villa, to sit at the Marots’ from morn till night, to recite verses more and more incomprehensible,--the children heard him, more than once, adjuring some one to die with him; while at nights he took to disappearing in the native quarters, in those dives where the Arabs, wrapped up in their dirty white _bournouses_, avidly watch stomach dances and drink the most pungent of liquors.... To put it briefly, not even a month and a half had gone before his inamoration had passed into God only knows what.

His nerves ceased entirely to serve him. Once he sat through almost an entire day in silence; then got up, took his hat, and went out,--and half an hour later was brought in from the street in a dreadful condition: he was writhing in hysterics; he was sobbing so vehemently that he frightened both the children and the domestics. But Mme. Marot, it seemed, did not attach any special significance even to this transport. She herself was restoring him back to consciousness, herself hastily untying his cravat and persuading him to be a man, and she only smiled when he, without any restraint whatsoever before her husband, caught at her hands, covering them with kisses and vowing his disinterested devotion. Still, it was necessary to put an end to all this. And so when Emile, whom the children had soon missed, again made his appearance several days after the fit, already calmed, even though he resembled a man who had gone through a severe illness, Mme. Marot gently told him all that is usually said in such cases.

“My friend, you are really like a son to me,” she had said to him, uttering for the first time this word, “son,” and really feeling almost a maternal tenderness toward him. “Do not, then, put me in a ridiculous and painful position.”

“But I swear to you that you are mistaken!” he exclaimed, with earnest vehemence. “I am only devoted to you; I only want to see you, and no more!”

And he suddenly fell down on his knees,--they were in the garden on a calm, sultry, dusky evening,--impulsively seized her by the hips, on the verge of fainting from passion.... And gazing upon his hair, upon his white, slender neck, she, with anguish and rapture, reflected:

“Ah,--yes, yes, I could have had a son almost the same as he!”

Still, from that time until his very departure for France, he committed no more insane actions. Essentially this was bad; it may have signified that his passion had become deeper. But outwardly everything had changed for the better,--only one other time he could not restrain himself. After dinner one Sunday, in the presence of several strangers, he said to her, without at all reflecting that this might attract attention:

“I most earnestly entreat you to grant me one minute....”

She got up and went with him into the empty, half-dark parlour. He walked up to the window, through which the evening light penetrated from outside in narrow longitudinal streaks, and, looking her straight in the face, said:

“To-day is the anniversary of my father’s death. I love you!”

She turned to go away. Frightened, he hastened to add as she was going away:

“Forgive me,--this is the first time and the last!”

And truly, she heard no new admissions from him. “I was enchanted by her confusion,” he wrote in his diary that evening, in his choice and grandiloquent style; “I vowed to violate her peace no more: for am I not beatified even as it is?” He continued going into the town,--he only slept at the Villa Hassim; and his behaviour varied, but he always observed a greater or lesser degree of seemliness. At times he was, as formerly, inappropriately playful, naïve, romping with the children in the garden; most frequently of all, however, he sat near her and “drank in her presence,” read newspapers and novels to her, and “was happy because she listened to him.” “The children did not interfere with us,” he wrote of these days, “their voices, laughter, bustle, their very beings, seemed to serve as the finest of conductors for our emotions; thanks to them these emotions were still more enchanting; we held the commonest of every day conversations, but something else could be heard in them,--our happiness; yes,--yes; she, too was happy, I affirm this. She liked to hear me declaim; of evenings, from the balcony, we contemplated Constantine lying at our feet in the blue radiance of the moon....” Finally, in August, Mme. Marot insisted upon his going away, returning to his studies,--and won; and _en route_ he entered in his diary: “I am going away! Going away, empoisoned by the bitter delight of parting! She has bestowed upon me, in parting, a bit of velvet ribbon that she had worn about her neck as a girl. When the last minute came, she gave me her blessing, and I saw a humid sparkle in her eyes when she said: ‘Farewell, dear son of mine!...’”

Whether he was right in his conjecture that Mme. Marot also was happy in August, is not known. But that his departure proved painful to her is beyond a doubt. This word “son,” which had stirred her even previously, now took on such a sound for her that she could not hear it in peace. Even formerly, upon meeting friends on her way to church, who would jestingly say to her: “What should you pray about, Mme. Marot; you are without sin and happy as it is!” she had, more than once, replied with a sad smile: “I complain to God because he has deprived me of a son....” Now the thought of a son, of that happiness which he would have ceaselessly given her by his mere existence in this world, never left her. And once, shortly after the departure of Emile, she had said to her husband:

“Now I have comprehended everything! I now know surely, that every mother ought to have a son; that every woman who has no son, if she will but ponder upon herself, will check up her entire life, will see that she is unhappy. You are a man, you cannot feel this, but it is so.... Oh, how tenderly and passionately one can love a son!”

She was very kind to her husband that fall. Occasionally, when she would be left alone with him, she would shyly say to him:

“Hector, listen.... I am ashamed now to ask you about it,--but still.... Do you ever recall the March of ’seventy-six? ... Ah, if only you and I had a son!”

“All this confused me very much,” Monsieur Marot would say subsequently,--“it confused me all the more because she began to grow very thin. She was growing weaker, was becoming more and more silent and gentle in manner. She went less and less often to her friends,--she avoided going to the city unless it were unavoidable.... I do not doubt that some dreadful and incomprehensible ailment was taking possession of her soul and body!” While the _bonne_ added that, whenever Mme. Marot went out of the house that fall, she always put on a thick white veil,--something she had never done before; that, returning home, she would immediately raise her veil in front of a mirror and would intently scrutinize her tired face. It is superfluous to explain that which went on in her soul at this time. But did she want to see Emile, did he write to her, and did she reply to him? He presented two dispatches at court, purporting to be addressed to him, in answer to his letters. One was dated the tenth of November: “You are driving me mad. Calm yourself. Let me have immediate news of yourself.” The other, the twenty-third of December: “No, no, do not come, I implore you. Think of me, love me, as a mother.” But the certainty of these dispatches having been sent by her could not be proven, of course. One thing only is certain,--that from September until January Mme. Marot led a distressed, troubled, painful existence.