Part 3

The voice read on, but Malchus had ceased to listen. A phrase had caught his attention and he repeated it to himself, feeling somehow a vague consolation in it. In first and blessed natures there is not any desire of the future. Surely it was just in that desire of the future, the desire to continue his possession of Helena, that his present misery consisted. If only he could achieve a state of stability such as the philosopher seemed to be trying to define--a state of peaceful being instead of this endless craving for the unfulfilled. Again he focused his attention on the reading.

_What then, if some one should never depart from the contemplation of eternity, but should incessantly persevere in admiring its nature, and should be able to do this through the possession of an unwearied nature; such a one, perhaps, running to eternity, would there stop and never decline from it, in order that he might become similar to it and eternal, surveying eternity, and the eternal by that which is eternal in himself._

Malchus closed his eyes. The words and ideas, only half comprehended by his reason, brought comfort to his heart. He withdrew his mind from Helena and from the pain which obsessed him and concentrated it within upon the pure awareness of being, the eternal in himself. But soon, by no will of his own, his mind had escaped and was clamoring again at the doors behind which Helena had withdrawn herself. How could philosophy help a pain like his? It was beyond the control of will. This beautiful system of thought in which mind broke from the bonds of reason and flowered into ecstasy was accessible only to untroubled minds.

_We must think of the soul_, Chalchas was reading, _as not receiving in the body irrational desires and angers and other passions, but as abolishing all these and as having, as far as possible, no communion with the body._

Chalchas looked up and seeing that Malchus was listening attentively he unrolled more of the scroll and chose another passage.

_It is not by running after external things that the soul beholds temperance and justice, but she perceives them in contemplation of herself and of that which she formerly was, and views them like statues set up in herself which time has covered with rust. Then she purifies them, even as if gold had taken unto itself life and, because it was encrusted with earth, perceived not that it was gold and knew not itself; but afterward, shaking off the earth which clung to it, had been filled with wonder to behold itself pure and alone._

As if struck by a sudden thought, Chalchas laid down the book and took up one of the others. As he unrolled it and began to search for the passage he had thought of, Malchus's eyes wandered into the court where a slim fountain leaped from a little grove of flowering plants. The fountain, he thought, was a symbol of that pure being, always vividly alive, yet always unchanging and self-sufficing, which the philosopher vainly tried to define when he wrote of eternity and the soul. Its clear watery music soothed his sense as the voice of Chalchas had done; and as he listened the voice rose, gentle and unobtrusive, again, the words it spoke mixing with the voice of the water. _Dissimilar Natures ... The Immortal and the mortal ... The spiritual and that which is deprived of spirit ... The indivisible and that which is broken by division_,--the phrases danced like bubbles on the surface of Chalchas's speech, and then Malchus was once again listening attentively. _For by reason of all these things there comes upon the soul mighty tumult and labor in the realms of generation, since we pursue a flying mockery which is ever in motion. And the soul, declining to a material life, kindles a light in her dark tenement the body, but she herself is lodged in obscurity; but by giving life to the body she destroys herself and her own spirit in as great a degree as these can suffer destruction. For thus the mortal nature participates in spirit, but the spiritual nature in death, and the whole becomes a prodigy, as Plato beautifully observes in his Laws, composed of the mortal and immortal, of the spiritual, and that which is deprived of the spirit. For the physical law which binds the soul to the body is the death of the immortal life but giver of life to the mortal body._

Malchus raised his hand as a sign that the reading should cease, and the Greek, taking up the books and the stool on which he had been sitting, retired across the court.

_Chapter Four_

Malchus remained wrapped in thought till he was roused by the sound of approaching footsteps, and, raising his eyes, saw one of his slaves coming toward him, carrying a long palm-leaf mat which he spread before Malchus saying:

"There is a hermit at the door, sir, with mats and baskets for sale." He stood waiting for Malchus to speak and inspecting the mat critically; and, believing that Malchus was debating whether he should buy the mat or not, he added, "The weaving is unusually good, sir."

But Malchus had not been considering the mat. The news that a hermit selling palm-leaf mats was at his door had strengthened rather than interrupted the train of thought which had occupied him since Chalchas had ceased reading. Malchus knew from the fact the hermit was selling mats and baskets that he must be one of the Christian hermits from the desert. They were familiar figures in Alexandria, for many of them, having tramped across the burning sands till they reached the Nile or the southern bank of Lake Mareotis and having there taken ship, appeared at rare intervals in the city to sell the work of their hands and so earn enough to buy for themselves the bare necessities of life.

Malchus himself, like most of his friends, had been born a Christian and had been christened, for his parents were of orthodox faith. As a child, like many children, he had taken religion very seriously. The ceremonies of the church delighted him: he used to imitate them very accurately in his nursery, repeating portions of the services by heart to the astonishment of his nurse. Later he became a great student of the Scriptures and was much taken up with his own religious experiences and his successful or unsuccessful encounters with sin. The priest who had charge of him predicted a pious future. Then, quite suddenly, at the age of eighteen he changed. Christianity, he discovered, was fit only for children and women. He discarded it and proclaimed himself, with Diocles and the other cultured young men who were his friends, a free thinker with a sympathy for Greek classicism. They formed an exquisite society of their own which, helped by Diocles's growing reputation as a poet, became notorious for its artistic intellectualism, its refined licentiousness, and the extreme elegance of its feasts. But no man can change his nature, and in Malchus there was an impulsiveness, a violence, which was much more in accordance with Christianity than with Greece; and, though he would have been the last to admit it, he retained in his attitude to life the mental habit of a Christian.

But the Christianity of Alexandria, with its endless bickerings and riots, was a very different thing from the Christianity of the desert. Everyone in Alexandria had heard of those strenuous desert monasteries, buried in waterless wastes or high pitched on barren hills, and of the hermits who fled from even that strict and primitive existence and led solitary lives of incredible asceticism in cells built by themselves in the sand-swept wastes of Nitria or far south in the Thebaid. It was not so many years since Saint Anthony himself, the greatest of the hermits, had died at a great age and had been buried in an unknown desert grave, bequeathing his leather tunic and the coverlet of his bed to the bishop Athanasius; and the stories which were still told of his lonely battles against evil spirits and those gnawing temptations which lay hold on men living in solitude, held a strange and profound fascination for the earnest, unquiet, and fanatical heart of Malchus.

The philosophers whom Chalchas had just been reading to him, reduced life to mere thought and contemplation. In spite of the comforting ideas which he had received from them, he had realized, as he reflected on their words, that they could not help him, for his only hope lay in strenuous action, while all they could offer him was thought. The idea of a life of thought, of bodily passivity, terrified Malchus. For one of his violent nature, passivity meant despair; for passivity, he knew, would leave him at the mercy of his misery and his desires. For him action was imperative. He must do, not think, if ever he was to escape from himself and from Helena. He longed to hand over the control of himself to some directing discipline, to slave-drive his body, to tire himself out in some austere bodily labor which should have an arbitrary but supreme significance....

It was thoughts such as these that had leaped, like a sudden light, into his mind when the slave had told him that a hermit stood at his door, and it was for this reason that he roused himself and ordered the slave to invite the hermit to enter.

The slave, leaving the mat where he had laid it, went off to obey, and a few minutes later Malchus, raising his eyes, saw the hermit standing in the court, immovable as a vision. He was an old man, upright and gaunt. The small, sharply defined features and bright eyes, looking out from a thicket of gray hair and short, thick beard, gave an ingenuous, bird-like look to the sun-tanned face. Over his right shoulder several long mats were slung, like the one the slave had brought for Malchus to see, and strung on a rope which crossed the same shoulder and was grasped in his right hand he carried on his back a great bunch of palm-leaf baskets which rose above the height of his shoulders on each side of his face. In his left hand he held a staff.

After Malchus had beckoned to him twice the old man moved and began slowly to approach.

"Come, my friend," said Malchus. "I should like to buy some of your mats and baskets. Throw them down here and sit down yourself. My slave will spread out each mat so that I can examine it."

The hermit flung down his load as if glad to be eased of it, and Malchus saw that he was dressed in a rough tunic of untanned goatskin. He wore it with the hair turned inward against his body; a fringe of hair showed along the rough edges about his throat and round each thigh. His arms and legs were bare and he was shod with sandals. He ignored the couch which Malchus had ordered to be brought for him and sat down on the sample mat, spreading his bent knees outward and crossing his ankles. Malchus noticed the sharp shinbones and the extraordinary thinness and brownness of the legs. On their hairy, sun-parched skin patches of dry scurf showed white through the black hairs like salt on a brick. He sat immovable, with hanging head and fixed gaze, and there came from him the pungent animal smell of stale sweat. Once the smell would have sickened Malchus, but now it had no repulsion for him, for it savored of a simple and primitive life free from the luxuries and refinements against which his whole soul was in revolt.

"Before we attend to business," he said, "you must have some food and wine."

The hermit slowly raised his head. "I should be glad of a handful of dates and a cup of water," he said in a small, clear, tranquil voice.

"Wine would be better," answered Malchus. "You are exhausted. A little wine will act as a tonic."

The old man shook his head. "To give a tonic to the body," he said, "is to offer a weapon to the Enemy."

A slave brought him what he had asked for and he sat silently munching the dates and sometimes taking a little bird-like sip from the cup. There was something strangely touching in the spectacle of him sitting there, quietly ministering to the bare need of his frail body. For Malchus, in his present state of mind, he was a being from another world--a world of liberation and new powers, mysterious, peaceful, and ecstatic. In his attitude and his still gaze there was the limitless serenity of the desert. Malchus longed to talk to him intimately and frankly, and after a moment's thought he sent away the slaves and, leaving his couch, sat down on the floor near the hermit.

"Listen to me, my father," he said. "I will buy all your mats and baskets so that you will not need to wander from house to house, because I want you to stay here and help me with your advice."

The old man's voice came clear and calm: "Why should you ask a foolish man for advice?"

"You are not foolish, my father."

"I am foolish according to the wisdom of this world."

"I am not seeking for the wisdom of this world. I know that you are wise in the wisdom that I desire."

"If you truly believed that I am wise, you would not want to ask me questions. You would follow my example."

"But there are many ways of living wisely--different ways for different men. Of late, my father, I have been in great trouble and bewilderment and I cannot see my way. I desire the perfect life but I do not know how to find it. Recently I have read some of the writings of Plotinus and Proclus and I have found much that is good and beautiful in them. When they write of becoming one with the Divine my soul is drawn to their philosophy, but I am afraid of a life of thought because I know that I shall not find peace in thought alone. I hoped that you might explain to me a better way."

"I can explain nothing. We who are true Christians have no need of reasoning, because we have the faith which is made perfect through the love of the Lord Jesus."

"Is reason, then, of no value?"

"I will ask you a question. Which comes first, reason or mind? Is reason the source of mind, or the mind of reason?"

"I should say that the mind was the source of reason, because reasoning is an activity of the mind."

The old man nodded his head. "Then is not a bright and illumined mind greater than reason? Faith is the divine reason and deeds are truer and sharper than words."

"Tell me this, at least, my father. If I become a Christian and a hermit shall I escape from the love of women and the desires of the flesh?"

"No. They will assail you more fiercely in the desert than ever they did in the city."

Malchus sat silent. He was accustomed to the impassioned arguments of the town and was surprised that this old man, who had devoted his whole life to his faith, should have no desire to convert others to it. On the contrary, the replies he had given to Malchus's questions seemed intended to repulse rather than to draw him toward the hermit life. And yet, in the small, calm voice there had been no repulsion. It was unclouded by violence or stress, more like the sound of running water, or the murmur of the wind about walls and roofs. And turning his eyes to the old man now, he saw that he had relapsed into his attitude of contemplation, his head bent slightly forward and his eyes gazing steadfastly before him; and as Malchus watched him he raised his right arm without stirring his body and, reaching over his left shoulder, drew over his head a linen cowl which Malchus had not noticed before. It hung to his breast, covering his face, and when he had dropped his hand to the ground again he remained immovable in that attitude, like an idol carved out of wood.

Malchus rose and sat silent on his couch, occupied with his troubles and vague desires and afraid to disturb the hermit. But after an hour of immobility the old man rose, threw back his head cloth, and began to walk toward the door. He had forgotten his mats and baskets, but Malchus followed him and, touching his arm, offered him a handful of money. He stopped and took the money with a nod of the head, and was on the point of moving again, when Malchus spoke:

"I beg of you to stay here for a day or two, my father."

The old man turned his quiet, luminous gaze upon Malchus. "I cannot, my son," he replied, "for as a fish dies when a man lifts it from the water, so, if we hermits remain long among men, our minds become troubled and perverted. I must return to the city not built with hands."

"Which way will you go?"

"By the Lake Mareotis."

A sudden impulse made Malchus kneel down. "Bless me, my father," he said.

The hermit lifted his right hand, and Malchus heard the small, clear voice above him: "The blessing of God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son be upon you."

Malchus rose to his feet. "Tell me your name, my father?" he asked.

"My name is Serapion," replied the hermit. He vanished quietly out of the court and Malchus read in his face and movement that he was setting out immediately on his long journey back to the desert....

After the hermit had gone, Malchus fell again into meditation. His mind was in that state of ferment in which transformations which normally take shape by slow degrees throughout months and even years, may occur in the upheaval and agony of a single day. His soul, disturbed and harassed by the gradual crumbling of his union with Helena, had revolted suddenly and violently when she had deliberately flaunted a new lover in his face, and he had turned with all the fierceness of his nature, not against her, but against the whole life and society of which he and she were a part. Then, snatching in despair for some support in the ruin which had engulfed him, he had seized upon the idea which had attracted him both in the philosophy of the Neo-Platonists and in the Christian faith--the idea of a life isolated and self-sufficing, relying neither on human relationship nor on material support, but deriving its strength from a power within or beyond itself to which it resigned itself completely. In that idea he had felt a vague comfort even though the passivity and emptiness which it seemed to imply had discouraged him. Upon this the chance arrival of the hermit Serapion had come as a sudden solution. In the old man's serene detachment, his primitive and elemental air, Malchus had felt something more than a discipline of the mind: these things spoke of a discipline of the body, a life of physical battle, strenuous, unrelenting, the necessary and satisfying counterpart to those battles of the soul. The brevity of his replies, the perfect assurance of his faith, had embodied for Malchus that security after which he was groping. The hermit's impatience of argument, his lack of any desire to win over others to his faith, had roused in him more zeal than the most impassioned pleading could have roused. Now as he sat with bowed head he felt an excitement stirring within him. He was like one who, having wandered long in the dark, sees a light moving far ahead and, careless now of the pitfalls about him, runs straight on, absorbed body and soul in the pursuit of that vision of salvation.

It was in this state that his mother found him when, an hour after the hermit's departure, she came to visit him. She advanced down the portico, straight and dignified with her grave smile, and at the sight of her a sudden longing rose in him to drop back into his boyhood and take refuge again in her protecting love. It was a momentary impulse, no more; for such a regression, even if it had been possible, would have carried him back also into a life which had now grown hateful to him. As he rose to greet her, she saw the feverish light in his eyes, and when he had led her into an inner room and they had sat down side by side, she laid a cool hand on his forehead.

"Your head is cool," she said. "I was afraid at first that you had a headache!" And, knowing that inquiries about his health always irritated him, she went on, without waiting for him to speak, to talk of various matters--of relatives and friends recently seen or heard of, and of how Malchus's father had just secured a famous artist to redecorate their dining hall.

"You must come and see the designs when they are ready," she said. "The house will be yours some day, so you, as well as your father and I, must approve of them."

Malchus felt himself suddenly recalled by that casual remark to the world from which in spirit he had already traveled so far, and when his mother went on to speak to him with gentle anxiety of his future, he saw almost with the vividness of actuality the life which she contemplated for him. It was not the life of luxurious unconventionality which he had led for the last few years. It was the life of aristocratic conservatism in which he had been brought up, and the thought of it repelled him as much as the gay life against which he was in revolt. But the sight of his mother's gentle and earnest face as she leaned toward him with a little look of inquiry disarmed all show of antagonism in him. He loved her, and whenever, as so often happened, their sympathies clashed, he strove always not to hurt her.

"We have a feast next Thursday," she said to him. "I know you dislike these solemn dinners of ours, but come if you have nothing better to do. It would please your father. Crassus and Pompilla are coming and are bringing Julia."

"So you are still plotting, mother!" said Malchus with a smile.

She smiled back at him. "Well," she replied, "we have not yet quite given up hope. You cannot deny, at least, that Julia is an excellent young woman and that it would be a very good match. But if you do not care about her, there are others. What your father and I are thinking about most is the children. We were still young when you were born, but your boyhood prolonged our youth. Since you left us the house has been too quiet; we feel our age and long for your children so that with them we can grow young again. Then, as you know, your father is ambitious for you. We are both proud of the fact that for generations the family has held high positions in the state and it has been a disappointment to your father that you have not followed the family tradition."

"I only wish," answered Malchus, "that I could satisfy you both in this, but politics and government have no attraction for me, mother. If I took up a government post I should be an irritable and disillusioned old man before I reached forty."

"A thing too horrible to be thought of! Let us say no more about it, my boy. It is useless, I fully admit, to do violence to oneself in such matters. But you can have no such prejudice against marriage. In that direction, at least, your father and I can reasonably indulge our hopes." She rose to depart. "And you will come to our solemn dinner?" Her lip curled humorously.

"If I am here, I will come," Malchus replied, and he accompanied her to the house door and helped her into her litter.

_Chapter Five_