Chapter 10

Mysterious, breathless, was the summer night. An influence of the time seemed to press upon us; something exhaled from the mystery of flowers drew sleep down upon us. Twilight lay upon the eyebrows of the girl, and the cloud of her dark hair nodded over it like the oncoming night. We sat down upon a grass mound. We ourselves, Nature around us, all things of the day, seemed under a spell. Sleep lay about the roses, the bushes mused inwardly, the honeysuckle exhaled enchantment and was itself enchanted. Then the things of the night came. The myriad midges performed their rites over the blackthorn and the oak, and blackthorn and oak looked as if changed into stone. The mice and the shrews crept safely over the toes of the blackberry bushes, the rabbits came tumbling along through banks of inanimate grass. And fat night-moths sucked honey from half-conscious flowers, and the same moths whirred duskily round our gathered roses or darted daringly into our faces. We were like the flowers and the grass and the blackberry and blackthorn. The night which had overtaken them and put them to sleep had settled upon us also, and the things of the night came out securely at our feet. For a moment, a sport of habit had betrayed us to the old Eden habits, had taken us a step into a forgotten harmony. But below the surface the old fought secretly with the new, that old that seems so much the newest of the new, that new that really is so old and stale. The new must have won, and in me first, for I rose suddenly, brusquely, as if somehow I felt I had unawares been acting unaccountably foolishly. I looked at my companion; the mood was still upon her, and I believe she might easily have slumbered on into the night, but as she saw me rise, the new in her gained reinforcement, and she too rose in a sort of mild surprise. Now I think I might have left her there to awaken late in the night, a new Titania with the moonbeams coming through the forest branches to her.

I awakened her. I think she has often been awakened since then, but indeed it is seldom now that she is allowed to slip into such slumber. We walked home and I said some poems on the way; she heard. I think she heard in the same way as a flower feels the touch of a bee. No words had she, no poetry of words to give back. She had not awakened to articulateness. She had no thoughts; she breathed out beauty. She understood no thoughts; she breathed in beauty from around.

* * * * *

This was Zenobia, this was her aspect when she was taken, when the change came over her life.

That marvellous mechanism, the modern state, with its mysterious springs and subterranean attractions and exigencies, drew her in to itself. The modern state, whose every agent is called Necessity, had appealed to her. And she had been taken. She settled on the outskirts of a city and half her life was spent under a canopy of smoke, whilst in the other half she courted morning and evening twilights. In the first June of this time, in afternoons and evenings, we had lived together among the roses, and she had stood at the zenith of her glory. But with the coming on of autumn the roses withered, and something of the old dreaminess left her eyes. A little melancholy settled upon her, and she discovered she was lonely. But the town had seen her, and henceforth the town took charge of her. It sent its angels to her. One might wonder what the town used her for, this inarticulate one--it made her a teacher because of her good memory. Then it regarded her as "good material." It sent its angels, those voluntary servants of the state, the acquaintances who call themselves friends. These at first approved of her, always misunderstood her, and at length despised her. They misunderstood her, because a person truly inarticulate was incomprehensible to them. Her naïveté they mistook for insolence, her dreaminess for disrespect. They confused her memory with her understanding. They gave her books to read, brought her to lectures, sat her at the theatre, took her to hear sermons, prayed with her and drank with her the holy wine. And some would say, "Isn't she coming on?" or "Isn't she developing?" and others, more perceiving, would say, "Well, even if she isn't getting anything from it, at least she's seeing life"; while others, more perceiving still, gave her up as past hope. "She has no brains," they said. Others, still more perceiving, said she had no soul, no love; she cared for no one, understood nothing. She, for her part, went on almost as ever, and remained next to inarticulate. Only now and again the hubbub of battle in the schoolroom would awaken her to some sort of conscious exasperation. She would appeal to her class, staring at them with eyes from which all gentleness and affection had merged into astonishment and indignation. For the rest, lack of life, lack of sun, lack of life influence told upon her beauty. She did not understand the influence of the ill-constituted around her, and did not understand the pain which now and again thrilled through her being, provoking sighs and word-sighs. Then those friend-acquaintances, ever on the alert for an expression of real meaning, interpreted her sighs and longings for week-ends in the country.

Verily it is true, one cannot serve God and mammon. There was no health forthcoming through this compromise with life. She merely felt more pain. She continued her work in the town, and was enrolled and fixed in many little circles where little wheels moved greater wheels in the great state-machine. Ostensibly, always now, whatever new she did was a step toward saving her soul. I met her one January night; she was going to a tea-meeting in connection with a literary society. Very grey her face looked. Many of the old beautiful curves were gone, and mysteries about her dimples and black hair-clusters seemed departed irrevocably. Still much in her slept safe, untouched as ever, and, as ever, she was without thoughts. Her memory suggested what she should say to me. "It will be interesting," she remembered. I helped her off with coat and furs. She was dressed wonderfully. The gown she wore--of deep cinnamon and gold--was still the dress of Zenobia, and at her bosom the strange flower exhaled its mystery. I went in with her to the hot room. She was evidently a queen here, as in the forest glades. And her pale face lit up as she moved about among the "little-worldlings" and exchanged small-talk and cakes and tea. She was evidently in some way responsible for the entertainment, for the chairman said "they all owed her so much." I watched her face, it showed no sign of unusual gratification; had he slighted her, I am sure she would have listened as equably. What a mask her face was! The look of graciousness was permanent, and probably only to me did she betray her continuous sleepiness and lack of interest in the whole affair. Members propounded stupendously solemn questions about the "salvation of man," the "state of progress," the mystic meaning of passages of the Bible, and the like; and I watched her draw on her memory for answers. She was never at a loss, and her interlocutors went away, and named their little child-thoughts after her.

I took her away at last and whispered some things in her ears, and showed her what could be seen of moon and stars from the narrow street, and something of the old summer feeling came over us. How the old time sang sorrowfully back, plaintively, piteously. Our steps sounded along some silent streets, the doors of the little houses were shut and dark. They might have been the under doors of tombs. Silently we walked along together, and life sang its little song to us from the depths of its prison. It sounded like the voice of a lover now lost for ever, one worth more beyond compare than any that could come after.

There is no going back. I saw her to her little home and touched her tenderly at Goodbye.

She went in. The door closed and I was left standing alone in front of the closed door, and there was none around but myself. Then I was aware of a gust in the night-breeze blowing up for rain. Time had changed. Something had been taken from the future and something had been added to the past. The spiral gusts lifted the unseen litter of the street, and with them the harpies rose in my breast. And words impetuous would have burst out like the torrents of rain which the dark sky threatened.

The torrent came.

A girl like this simply grows like a flower on a heath, blossoms, fades, withers, and is lost. No more than that. I scarcely tell what I want to say. Oh, how strongly I would whisper it into the inmost heart! Life is not thoughts, is not calm, is not sights, is not reading or music, is not the refinement of the senses,--Life is--life. This is the great secret. This is the original truth, and if we had never begun to think, we should never have lost our instinctive knowledge. In one place flowers rot and die; in another, bloom and live. The truth is that in this city they rot and die. This is not a suitable place for a strong life; men and women here are too close together, there is not enough room for them, they just spring up thinly and miserably, and can reach no maturity, and therefore wither away. All around are the ill-constituted, the decaying, the dying. What chance had fresh life coming into the tainted air of this stricken city--this city where provision is made only for the unhealthy? For here, because something is the matter, every one has begun conscience-dissecting--thinking--and a rumour has got abroad that we live to get thoughts of God. And because thoughts of God are novel and comforting, they have been raised up as the great desideratum. And the state of society responsible for the production of these thoughts is considered blessed. The work of intensifying the characteristics of that society is thought blessed, and because in ease we think not, we prefer to live in disease. And the progress of disease we call Progress. So Progress and Thought are substituted for Life.

There _is_ a purpose of God in this city, but there is as much purpose in the desert. There is no astonishingly great purpose. The disease will work itself out. And I know God's whole truth to man was revealed long since, and any one of calm soul may know it. The hope of learning the purpose through the ages, the following of the gleam, is the preoccupation of the insane.

What do all these people and this black city want to make of _her_? She, and ten thousand like her, need life. Life, not thought, or progress, just the same old human life that has always been going on.

The rain was pouring heavily and I took shelter. I felt calmer; I had unpacked myself of words. Rather mournfully I now looked out into the night, and, as it were, ceased to speak to it, and became a listener. A song of sorrow came from the city, the wailing of mothers uncomforted, of children orphaned, uncared for, of forsaken ones. I heard again the old reproach of the children sitting in the market. "Here surely," I said, "where so many are gathered together, there is more solitude and lonely grief than in all the wide places of the earth!" Voices came up to me from thousands in a city where thousands of hands were uplifted to take a cup of comfort that cannot be vouchsafed.

Is there a way out for _her_? Is there a way out for them? "For her perhaps, for them not," something whispered within me inexorably. "And Death?" The wind caught up the whisper "death" caressingly and took it away from me over the city, and wove it in and out through all the streets and all the dark lanes, and about the little chimneys, and the windows.

Is there a way out for her?--Perhaps. There are some beings so full of life that even the glutton Death must disgorge them.

III

THE LITTLE DEAD CHILD

In the little town of Gagri on the Caucasian shore of the Black Sea there is a beautiful and wonderful church surviving from the sixth century, a work of pristine Christianity. It is but the size of a cottage, and just the shape of a child's Noah's Ark, but made of great rough-hewn blocks of grey stone. One comes upon the building unexpectedly. After looking at Gagri's ancient ruins, her fortresses, her wall built by Mithridates, one sees suddenly in a shadowy close six sorrowful little cypresses standing absolutely still--like heavily dressed guardsmen--and behind the cypresses and their dark green brooms, the grey wall of the church, solid, eternal. One's eyes rest upon it as upon a perfect resting-place. If Gagri has an organic life, this church must be its beating heart.

I came to Gagri one Saturday afternoon after the first two hundred and fifty miles tramping of my pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and at this little church I witnessed a strange sight. I had hardly admired the grey interior, the bare walls growing into the roof in unbroken curves, the massive stone rood-screen, the sorrowful faces in the holy pictures, when a little procession filed into the church; four girls carrying a flower-bedecked coffin, half a dozen elders, and a pack of children carrying candles--a sight at once terrible and diurnal, a child's funeral.

Russian churches, having no chairs, have the appearance of being almost empty. In the centre of this emptiness at Gagri church two trestles were put up, and the open coffin placed upon them; in the coffin, lying in a bed of fresh flowers and dressed in delicate white garments, was a little dead child. The coffin was perfectly and even marvellously arranged; it would be difficult to imagine anything more beautiful, and at the same time more terrible.

A girl of about four years, she lay in the coffin as in bed, with her head somewhat raised, and the face looking directly at the altar and at the sorrowful pictures; on her head was a cream silk embroidered bonnet, on her forehead, from ear to ear, a paper _riza_ with delicate line drawings of the story of the girl's angel, St. Olga. A high lighted candle stood at her head, two little ones at each side, and two at her feet. The bonnet and the dress were tied with little bits of pink ribbon; the child's hands, small, white, all lovely, lay one upon another, and in one of them was a little white cross. The face and arms were the colour of fine grey wax, the lips thin, dark red and set--the little dead girl looked steadfastly at the Ikons.

I stood and wondered. Round about the coffin were a score of people, mostly little children, who every now and then nicked away flies that were about to settle on the dead body. The grey church and its beauty melted away. There was only a little grey wax figure lying poised before the face of Christ, and little children flicking away flies.

Among the flowers in the coffin I noticed a heavy metal cross--it would be buried with her. Hanging over the trestles at each of the four corners were gorgeous hand-embroidered towels. "This is some rich person's child," I thought as I waited--it was twenty minutes before the father, the mother, and the priest arrived. I was mistaken; this was the child of ordinary peasants.

* * * * *

I wonder the mother was allowed to come to church; she was frantic with grief. When she came into the church she fell down on her knees and hugged the dead body and kissed it and sobbed--sobbed so horribly that except for the children there was no one present who kept dry eyes. The husband stood with his hands dangling at his side, his lips all puckered, his hair awry, and the tears streaming down his red cheeks.

But when the priest came in he took the good woman aside and quieted her, and in his words surely was comfort. "Those who die as children are assured of that glorious life above, for of them Christ said, 'Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, _for of such is the kingdom of heaven._' Least of all should we grieve when a child dies."

I held a candle with the others and joined in the little service, and when the service was over ate of the boiled rice and grapes that were handed round to save us from evil spirits.

The candles were put out, the priest retired, and then the sobbing broke forth once more, the people crowded round the coffin and one by one kissed the little dead one, kissed her again and again. Most of all the little children kissed her, and the father in distraction stood by, calling out in broken treble, "Say good-bye to her, children, say good-bye!"

Last of all, the wild mother said good-bye, and was only taken away by sheer force. Then the lid was put on the coffin, and the four girls--they were each about twelve years old--lifted it on the embroidered towels and carried it out of the church.

The mother fainted and was taken into the open air, where one woman helped to revive her by pouring water on her head out of an old kettle, and another by drinking water and spurting it out again in her face. Meanwhile the father took eight nails--he had them in his pocket--and with all the crowd looking on, he nailed down the lid of the coffin. The girls once more lifted their burden upon the beautiful towels, and they bore it away to the grave. The crowd followed them with hymns--

All we like dust go down into the grave,

the sound of their singing almost drowned by the beating of their uneven steps. The music modulated and died away to the silence of the evening. The little church remained grey and ancient, and the six cypresses stood unmoved, unmoving, like guards before some sacred portal....

And the pilgrim goes on his way.

IV

HOW THE OLD PILGRIM REACHED BETHLEHEM

At New Athos monastery in one of the common hostels there were some hundred peasant men and women, mostly pilgrims. It was after supper; some of the company were melting away to the dormitories, others remained talking.

There was one topic of conversation common to all. An old greybeard palmer had broken down that afternoon and died. He had been almost his whole life on the road to Jerusalem, and we all felt sad to think that he had been cut off when he was truly nearing the Holy Land.

"He wished to go since he was a little boy," said old Jeremy, an aged pilgrim in a faded crimson shirt. Every one paid respect to Jeremy and listened to him. He was a placid greybeard who had spent all his life upon the road, full of wisdom, gentle as a little child, and very frail.

"He wished to go when he was a little boy--that means he began to go when he was a little boy, for whenever you begin to wish you begin the pilgrimage. After that, no matter where you are, you are sure to be on the way. Up in the north the rivers flow under the earth, and no one sees them. But suddenly the river appears above the land, and the people cry out, 'See, the river is flowing to the sea.' But it began to go to the sea long ago. So it was with Mikhail. All his life he was a pilgrim. He lived in a distant land. He was born of poor parents, not here, but far away in the Petchora province--oh, far, far away."

Grandfather Jeremy waved his hand to signify how far.

"Four thousand versts at least, and he hasn't come straight by a long way. Most of the way he walked, and sometimes he got a lift, sometimes a big lift that took him on a long way."

"Ah, ah!" said a youngster sympathetically, "and all in vain, all in vain--_naprasno, naprasno_--"

Jeremy paid no attention.

"Big lifts," his voice quavered. "And now he is there. Yes, now he is there."

"Where, grandfather?"

"There, where he wished to be, in the Holy City. He had got very tired, and God had mercy on him. God gave him his last lift. He is there now, long before us."

"I don't see how you make that out," said a young man, a visitor, not a pilgrim. "God, I reckon, cheated him."

"God never cheats," said Jeremy calmly.

"God..." said the visitor, and was about to raise a discussion and try to convert these pilgrims from their superstition. But Jeremy interrupted him. For the old man, though a peasant, had a singular dignity.

"Hush! Pronounce not His name lightly. I will tell you a story."

"Silence now!" cried several. "Hear grandfather's story!"

The old man then told the story of an aged pilgrim who had died on his way to Jerusalem. I thought he was repeating the story of the life of Mikhail, so like were his present words to those that had gone before. But the issue was different. In this case the pilgrim died and was buried in a little village near Odessa.

He was a penniless beggar. In grandfather's picturesque language, "he had no money; instead of which he bore the reproach of Christ. He found other men's charity....

"All his life he wandered towards Bethlehem. He used to say he pilgrimaged not towards Calvary, but towards Bethlehem. The thought that the Roman officials had treated Christ as a thief was too much for him to bear.

"He who possessed all things they treated as one who had stolen a little thing...."

The old man paused at this digression, and stared around him with an expression of terror and stupefaction.

There was a silence.

"Go on, Jeremy," said some one impatiently.

Jeremy proceeded.

"He always journeyed towards Bethlehem, and whenever he saw a little child, a little baby, he would say to the mother that it foretold him what it would be like for him at the Holy Land. And of the cradles he would always say they were just the shape of the manger where the baby Christ was laid.

"He was very dear to mothers, you may be sure, and he never lacked their blessing.

"He travelled very slowly, for in Moscow a motor-car ran over his foot, and he always needed a strong staff. He was ill-treated sometimes in the towns, where the dogs bit him and the street children aimed stones. But he never took offence. He smiled, and thought how little his sufferings had been compared with those of the saints.

"So he grew old.

"'You are old, grandfather; you will never reach Jerusalem,' the peasant women told him. But he always smiled and said, 'As God wills. Perhaps if I die I shall see it sooner.'

"And he died, poor, wretched, uncared for, in the streets of a little village near Odessa, and children came and beat off the hungry dogs from his body with sticks.

"'What is this?' said one policeman to another.

"'A _Bogo-moletz_ (God-prayer) dead, that's all,' was the reply.

"'No money?'

"'None. If he had any his pockets have been picked.'

"By his passport he belonged to Petchora province, far away. No one knew him. No one claimed him.

"'It means he must be buried at the public expense,' said the head man of the village, and spat upon the ground.

"In the whole village only the coffin maker rejoiced, and he had small cause, since a pauper's coffin costs but a shilling.

"'He must be buried on the common,' said the head man. 'There's no room in the churchyard.'

"'But a pilgrim,' said an objector. 'You must bury him in consecrated ground; you can't shut him out of the Heavenly Kingdom.'

"'No matter. Ask the priest. If the dead man can pay for a plot of ground for a grave, well and good; or if the villagers will subscribe....'

"The head man looked at the little crowd assembled. They were a poor and needy crowd. No one answered him. Then, without doing any more, the head man walked away, and the dead body remained in the street.

"It seemed no one would pay for the grave, but in the afternoon a woman who lived on the outskirts came and claimed the pilgrim as a distant relative. He could scarcely have been a relative, except inasmuch as we are all descended from Adam.

"The head man and the village priest rejoiced, and the woman took the dead body home and washed it, and clothed it in white linen, and she ordered a three-rouble coffin covered with purple cloth.

"But she was a very poor woman, and when she had paid for the grave she had no money to pay for singers and for prayers.

"'God will have mercy,' she said. 'And belike he was a good man, a pilgrim.'