Foes Part 36

Yet the cloud dripped honey, the color was clear and not unrestful, the chord sweet and resounding.

The pageant, fantastic, towering, red and purple lighted, pa.s.sed by.

The throng upon the seats moved, rose, struck heavily with their feet, going down the narrow ways. Many torches had been extinguished, many that were carried had gone on, following the last triumphal car. Here were semi-darkness, great noise and confusion--weight, too, pressing upon ground that long ago had been honeycombed; where the crypt of a three-hundred-year-old church touched through an archway old priest paths beneath a vanished temple, that in turn gave into a mixed ruin of dungeons and cellars opening at last to day or night upon a hillside at some distance from the place of raised benches. Now, the crowd pressing thickly, the earth crust at one point trembled, cracked, gave way. Scaffolding and throng came with groans and cries into a very cavern. Those that were left above, high on narrow, overswaying platforms, with shouts of terror pushed back from the pit mouth, managed with accidents, injuries enough, to get to firmer earth. Then began, among the braver sort, rescue of those who had gone down with soil and timbers. What with the darkness and the confused and sunken ruin, this was difficult enough.

Ian and Alexander, unhurt, clambered down the standing part and by the light of congregated and improvised torches helped in that rescue, and helped strongly. Many were pinned beneath wood, smothered by the caving earth. The rent was wide and in places the ruin afire. Groans, cries, appeals shook the hearts of the carnival crowd. All would now have helped, but it was not possible for many. There must be strength to descend into the pit and work there.

A beam pinned a man more than near a creeping flame. The two Scots beat out that fire. Glenfernie heaved away the beam, Ian drew out the man, badly hurt, moaning of wife and child. Glenfernie lifted him, mounted with him, over heaped debris, by uncertain ledge and step, until other arms, outstretched, could take him. Turning back, he took from Ian a woman's form, lifted it forth. Down again, the two worked on. Others were with them, there was made a one-minded ring, folly forgot.

At last it seemed that all were rescued. A few men only moved now in the hollow, peering here and there. The fire had taken headway; the gulf, it was evident, would presently be filled with flame. The heat beat back those at the rim. "Come out! Come out, every one!" The rescuers began to clamber forth.

Came down a roaring pile of red-lit timbers, with smoke and sparks. It blocked the way for Alexander and Ian. Turning, here threatened a pillar of choking murk, red-tongued. Behind them was a gaping, narrow archway. Involuntary recoil before that stinging push of smoke brought them in under this. They were in a pa.s.sageway, but when again they would have made forth and across to the side of the pit, and so, by climbing, out of it, they found that they could not. Before them lay now a mere field of fire, and the blowing air drove a biting smoke against them.

"Move back, until this burns itself out! The earth gave into some kind of underground room. This is a pa.s.sage."

It stretched black behind them. Glenfernie caught up a thick, arm-long piece of lighted wood that would answer for brand. They worked through a long vaulted tunnel, turned at right angles, and came into what their torch showed to have been an ancient chapel. In a niche stood a broken statue, on the wall spread a painting of St. Christopher in midstream.

"Shall we go on? There must be a way out of this maze."

"If the torch will last us through."

They pa.s.sed out of the chapel into a place where of old the dead had been buried. They moved between ma.s.sy pillars, by the shelves of stone where the bones lay in the dust. It seemed a great enough hall. At the end of this they discovered an upward-going stair, but it was old and broken, and when they mounted it they found that it ended flat against thick stone, roof to it, pavement, perhaps, to some old church. They saw by a difference in the flags where had been s.p.a.ce, the stair opening into the hollow of the church; but now was only stone, solid and thick. They struck against it, but it was moveless, and in the church, if church there were above, none in the dead night to hear them. They came down the stair, and through a small, half-blocked doorway stumbled into a labyrinth of pa.s.sages and narrow chambers.

They found old pieces of wood--what had been a wine-cask, what might have had other uses. They broke these into torch lengths, lighting one from another as that burned down. These underways did not seem wholly neglected, buried, and forgotten. There lacked any total blocking or demolition, and there was air. But intricacy and uncertainty reigned.

The mood of the amphitheater when they had sat side by side claimed them still. There had been a reversion or a coming into fresh s.p.a.ce where quarrel faded like a shadow before light. The light was a golden, hazy one, made up of myriads of sublimed memories, a.s.sociations, judgments, conclusions. Nothing defined emerged from it; it was simply somewhat golden, somewhat warm light, as from a sun well under the horizon--a kind of dreamy well-being as of old Together, unquestioning Acceptance. Suddenly aroused, each might have cried, "For the moment--it was for a moment only!" Then, for the moment, there was return, with addition. It came like a winged force from the bounds of doing or undoing. While it lasted it imposed upon them quieted minds, withdrew any seeming need for question. They sought for egress from this place where their bodies moved, explanation of this material labyrinth. But they did not seek explanation of this mood, fallen among pride and anger, wrong and revenge. It came from at large, with the power of largeness. They were back, "for the moment,"

in a simplicity of ancient, firm companionship.

They spoke scarcely at all. It had been a habit of old, in their much adventuring together, to do so in long silences. Alexander had set the pace there, Ian learning to follow.... It was as if this were an adventure of, say, five years ago, and it was as if it were a dream adventure. Or it was as if some part of themselves, quietly and with a hidden will separating itself, had sailed away from the huge storm and cloud and red lightnings.... What they did say had wholly and only to do with immediate exigencies. Behind, in pure feeling, was the unity.

Down in this underground place the air began to come more freshly.

"Look at the flame," said Ian. "It is bending."

They had left behind rooms and pa.s.sages lined with unbroken masonry.

Here were newer chambers and excavations, softer walled.

"They have been opening from this side. That was dug not so long ago."

Another minute and they came into a ragged, cavern-like s.p.a.ce filled with fresh night air. Presently they were forth upon a low hillside, and at their feet Tiber mirrored the stars. Rome lay around. The carnival lights yet flared, the carnival noise beat, beat. This was a deserted strip, an islet between restless seas.

Ian and Alexander stood upon trodden earth and gra.s.s, about them the yet enc.u.mbering ruins of an ancient building, pillars and architraves and capitals, broken friezes and headless caryatids. Here was the river, here the ancient street. They breathed in the air, they looked at the sky, but then at Rome. Somewhere a trumpet was fiercely crying.

Like an impatient hand, like a spurred foot, it tore the magician's fabric of the past few hours.

Ian laughed. "We had best rub our eyes!" To the fine hearing there was a catch of the breath, a small dancing hope in his laughter. "_Or, Glenfernie, shall we dream on?_"

But the other opened his eyes upon things like the Kelpie's Pool and the old room in the keep where a figure like himself read letters that lied. He saw in many places a figure like himself, injured and fooled, stuck full of poisoned arrows. The figure grew as he watched it, until it overloomed him, until he was pa.s.sionately its partisan. He said no word, but he flung the smoking torch yet held in hand among the ruins, and, leaving Ian and his black and silver, plunged down the slope to the old, old street along which now poured a wave of carnival.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The laird of Glenfernie lay in the flowering gra.s.s, beneath a pine-tree, rising lonely from the Roman Campagna. The gra.s.s flowed for miles, a mult.i.tudinous green speculating upon other colors, here and there clearly donning a gold, an amethyst, a blue. The pine-tree looked afar to other pine-trees. Each seemed solitary. Yet all had the oneness of the great stage, and if it could comprehend the stage might swim with its little solitariness into a wider uniqueness. In the distance lay Rome. He could see St. Peter's dome. But around streamed the ocean of gra.s.s and the ocean of air. Lifted from the one, bathed in the other, strewed afar, appeared the wreckage of an older Rome.

There was no moving in Rome or its Campagna without moving among time-cleansed bones and vestiges. Rome and its Campagna were like Sarga.s.so Seas and held the hulks of what had been great galleons. The air swam above endless gra.s.s, endless minute flowers. In long perspective traveled the arches of an Aqueduct.

He lay in the shadow of a broken tomb. It was midspring. The bland stillness of this world was grateful to him, after long inner storm.

He lay motionless, not far from the skirts of Contemplation.

The long line of the Aqueduct, arch after arch, succession fixed, sequence which the gaze made unitary, toled on his thought. He was regarding span after span of imagery held together, a very wide and deep landscape of numerous sequences, more planes than one. He was seeing, around the cells, the shadowy force lines of the organ, around the organ the luminous mist of the organism. He pa.s.sed calmly from one great landscape to another.

Rome. To-day and yesterday and the day before, and to-morrow. The "to-morrow" put in the life, guaranteeing an endless present, endless breathing. He saw Rome the giant, the stone and earth of her, the vast animal life of her, the vast pa.s.sional, the mental clutch and hammer-blow. The spiritual Rome? He sought it--it must be there. At last, among the far arches, it rose, a light, a leaven, an ether....

Rome.

If there were boundaries in this ocean of air they were gauze-thin and floating. He looked here and there, into landscapes Rome led to. Like and like, and synthesis of syntheses! Images, finding that of which they were images, lost their grotesqueness or meaninglessness of line, their quality of caricature, lost unripeness, lost the dull annoy of riddles never meant to be answered.... He had a great fund of images, material so full that it must begin to build higher. Building higher meant arrival in a fluid world where all aggregates were penetrable.

He lay still among the gra.s.ses, and it was as though he lay also amid the wide, simple, first growths of a larger, more potent living. Now and again, through years, he had been aware of approaches, always momentary, to this condition, to a country that lay behind time and s.p.a.ce, cause and effect, as he ordinarily knew them. The lightning went--but always left something transforming. And then for three years all gleams stopped, a leaden wall that they could not pierce rearing itself.

Latterly they had begun to return.... The proud will might rise against them, but they came. Then it must be so, he would have said of another, that the will was divided. Part of it must still have kept its seat before the door whence the lights came, stayed there with its face in its hands, waiting its season. And a part that had said no must be coming to say yes, going and taking its place beside the other by the door. And together they were strong enough to bring the gleaming back, watching the propitious moment. But still there was the opposed will, and it was strong.... When the light came it sought out old traces of itself, and these became revivified. Then all joined together to make a flood against the abundant darkness. A day like this joined itself through likeness to others on the other side of the three years, and also to moments of the months just pa.s.sed and pa.s.sing. Union was made with a sleepless night in an inn of Spain, with the hours after his encounter with Ian in the Paris theater, with that time he sat upon the river steps and saw that the dead were living and the prisoners free, with the hour in the amphitheater and after, in carnival.

He saw and heard, felt and tasted, life in greater lengths and breadths. He comprehended more of the pattern. The tones and semi-tones fell into the long scale. Such moments brought always elevation, deep satisfaction.... More of the will particles traveled from below to the center by the door.

The soul turned the mind and directed it upon Alexander Jardine's own history. It spread like a landscape, like a continent viewed from the air, and here it sang with attainment and here it had not attained; and here it was light, and here there were darknesses; right-doing here and wrong-doing there and every shade between. He saw that there was right- and wrong-doing quite outside of conventional standards.

Where were frontiers? The edges of the continent were merely spectral.

Where did others end and he begin, or he end and others begin? He saw that his history was very wide and very deep and very high. Through him faintly, by nerve paths in the making, traveled the touch of oneness.

Alexander Jardine--Elspeth Barrow--Ian Rullock. And all others--and all others.

There swam upon him another great perspective. He saw Christ in light, Buddha in light. The glorified--the unified. _Union._

Alexander Jardine--Elspeth Barrow--Ian Rullock. And all others--and all others. _For we are members, one of another._

The feathered, flowered gra.s.s, miles of it, and the sea of air.... By degrees the level of consciousness sank. The splendid, steadfast moment could not be long sustained. Consciousness drew difficult breath in the pure ether, it felt weight, it sank. Alexander moved against the old tomb, turned, and buried his face in his arms. The completer moment went by, here was the torn self again. But he strove to find footing on the thickening impressions of all such moments.

Moving back to Rome, along the old way where had marched all the legions, by the ruins, under the blue sky, he had a sense of going with Caesar's legions, step by step, targe by targe, and then of his footstep halting, turning out, breaking rhythm.... From this it was suddenly a winter night and at Glenfernie, and he sat by the fire in his father's death-room. His father spoke to him from the bed and he went to his side and listened to dying words, distilled from a wide garden that had relaxed into bitterness, growths, and trails of ideal hatred.... _What was it, setting one's foot upon an adder?... What was the adder?_

He entered the city. His lodging was above the workroom and shop of a recoverer of ancient coins and intaglios, skilful cleanser and mender of these and merchant to whom would buy. The man was artist besides, maker of strange drawings whom few ever understood or bought.

Glenfernie liked him--an elderly, fine, thin, hook-nosed, dark-eyed, subtle-lipped, little-speaking personage. No great custom came to the shop in front; the owner of it might work all day in the room behind, with only two or three peals of a small silvery summoning bell. The lodger acquired the habit of sitting for perhaps an hour out of each twenty-four in this workroom. He might study at the window gem or coin and the finish of old designs, or he might lift and look at sheet after sheet of the man's drawings, or watch him at his work, or have with him some talk.

The drawings had a fascination for him. "What did you mean behind this outward meaning? Now here I see this, and I see that, but here I don't penetrate." The man laid down his mending a broken Eros and came and stood by the table and spoke. Glenfernie listened, the wood propping elbow, the hand propping chin, the eyes upon the drawing. Or he leaned back in the great visitor's chair and looked instead at the draftsman.

They were strange drawings, and the draftsman's models were not materially visible.

To-day Glenfernie came from the noise of Rome without into this room.

His host was sitting before a drawing-board. Alexander stood and looked.

"Are you trying to bring the world of the plane up a dimension? Then you work from an idea above the world of the solid?"