Folle Farine Part 38

So the words of the old Scald by his own northern seash.o.r.es came to pa.s.s; and at length, for the sake of art, it came to this, that he perished for want of bread.

For seven days he had been without food, except the winter berries which he broke off the trees without, and such handfuls of wheat as fell through the disjointed timbers of the ceiling, for whose possession he disputed with the rats.

The sheer, absolute poverty which leaves the man whom it has seized without so much as even a crust wherewith to break his fast, is commoner than the world in general ever dreams. For he was now so poor that for many months he had been unable to buy fresh canvas on which to work, and had been driven to chalk the outlines of the innumerable fancies that pursued him upon the bare smooth gray stone walls of the old granary in which he dwelt.

He let his life go silently away without complaint, and without effort, because effort had been so long unavailing, that he had discarded it in a contemptuous despair.

He accepted his fate, seeing nothing strange in it, and nothing pitiable; since many men better than he had borne the like. He could not have altered it without beggary or theft, and he thought either of these worse than itself.

There were hecatombs of grain, bursting their sacks, in the lofts above; but when, once on each eighth day, the maltster owning them sent his men to fetch some from the store, Arslan let the boat be moored against the wall, be filled with barley, and be pushed away again down the current, without saying once to the rowers, "Wait; I starve!"

And yet, though like a miser amidst his gold, his body starved amidst the n.o.ble shapes and the great thoughts that his brain conceived and his hand called into substance, he never once dreamed of abandoning for any other the career to which he had dedicated himself from the earliest days that his boyish eyes had watched the vast arc of the arctic lights glow above the winter seas.

Art was to him as mother, brethren, mistress, offspring, religion--all that other men hold dear. He had none of these, he desired none of them; and his genius sufficed to him in their stead.

It was an intense and reckless egotism, made alike cruel and sublime by its intensity and purity, like the egotism of a mother in her child. To it, as the mother to her child, he would have sacrificed every living creature; but to it also, like her, he would have sacrificed his very existence as unhesitatingly. But it was an egotism which, though merciless in its tyranny, was as pure as snow in its impersonality; it was untainted by any grain of avarice, of vanity, of selfish desire; it was independent of all sympathy; it was simply and intensely the pa.s.sion for immortality:--that sublime selfishness, that superb madness, of all great minds.

Art had taken him for its own, as Demeter, in the days of her desolation, took the child Demophoon, to nurture him as her own on the food of G.o.ds, and to plunge him through the flames of a fire that would give him immortal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid fears of the mortal mother lost to the child for evermore the possession of Olympian joys and of perpetual youth, so did the craven and earthly cares of bodily needs hold the artist back from the radiance of the life of the soul, and drag him from the purifying fires. Yet he had not been utterly discouraged; he strove against the Metaniera of circ.u.mstance; he did his best to struggle free from the mortal bonds that bound him; and as the child Demophoon mourned for the great G.o.ddess that had nurtured him, refusing to be comforted, so did he turn from the base consolations of the senses and the appet.i.tes, and beheld ever before his sight the ineffable majesty of that Mater Dolorosa who once had anointed him as her own.

Even now, as the strength returned to his limbs and the warmth to his veins, the old pa.s.sion, the old worship, returned to him.

The momentary weakness which had a.s.sailed him pa.s.sed away. He shook himself with a bitter impatient scorn for the feebleness into which he had been betrayed; and glanced around him still with a dull wonder as to the strange chances which the night past had brought. He was incredulous still; he thought that his fancy, heated by long fasting, might have cheated him; that he must have dreamed; and that the food and fuel which he saw must surely have been his own.

Yet reflection told him that this could not be; he remembered that for several weeks his last coin had been spent; that he had been glad to gather the birds' winter berries to crush beneath his teeth, and gather the dropped corn from the floor to quiet the calm of hunger; that for many a day there had been no fire on the hearth, and that only a frame which the long sunless northern winters had braced in early youth, had enabled him to resist and endure the cold. Therefore, it must be charity!

Charity! as the hateful truth came home to him, he met the eyes of the white, slender, winged Hermes; eyes that from out that colorless and smiling face seemed to mock him with a cruel contempt.

His was the old old story;--the rod of wealth bartered for the empty sh.e.l.l that gave forth music.

Hermes seemed to know it and to jeer him.

Hermes, the mischief-monger, and the trickster of men, the inventive G.o.d who spent his days in chicanery of his brethren, and his nights in the mockery of mortals; the messenger of heaven who gave Pandora to mankind; Hermes, the eternal type of unscrupulous Success, seemed to have voice and cry to him:--"Oh, fool, fool, fool! who listens for the music of the spheres and disdains the only melody that men have ears to hear--the melody of gold!"

Arslan turned from the great cartoon of the G.o.ds in Pherae, and went out into the daylight, and stripped and plunged into the cold and turbulent stream. Its chillness and the combat of its current braced his nerves and cleared his brain.

When he was clad, he left the grain-tower with the white forms of its G.o.ds upon its walls, and walked slowly down the bank of the river. Since life had been forced back upon him he knew that it was inc.u.mbent upon his manhood to support it by the toil of his hands if men would not accept the labor of his brain.

Before, he had been too absorbed in his pursuit, too devoted to it body and soul, to seek to sustain existence by the sheer manual exertion which was the only thing that he had left untried for self-maintenance.

In a manner too he was too proud; not too proud to labor, but too proud to easily endure to lay bare his needs to the knowledge of others. But now, human charity must have saved him; a charity which he hated as the foulest insult of his life; and he had no chance save to accept it like a beggar bereft of all shame, or to seek such work as would give him his daily bread.

So he went; feebly, for he was still weak from the length of his famine.

The country was well known to him, but the people not at all. He had come by hazard on the old ruin where he dwelt, and had stayed there full a year. These serene blue skies, these pale mists, these corn-clad slopes, these fields of plenteous abundance, these quiet homesteads, these fruit-harvests of this Norman plain were in soothing contrast to all that his life had known.

These old quaint cities, these little villages that seemed always hushed with the sound of bells, these quiet streams on which the calm sunlight slept so peacefully, these green and golden lands of plenty that stretched away to the dim gray distant sea,--all these had had a certain charm for him.

He had abided with them, partly because amidst them it seemed possible to live on a handful of wheat and a draught of water, unnoticed and unpitied; partly because having come hither on foot through many lands and by long hardship, he had paused here weary and incapable of further effort.

Whilst the little gold he had had on him had lasted he had painted innumerable transcripts of its ancient buildings, and of its summer and autumnal landscapes. And of late--through the bitter winter--of late it had seemed to him that it was as well to die here as elsewhere.

When a man knows that his dead limbs will be huddled into the common ditch of the poor, the nameless, and the unclaimed, and that his dead brain will only serve for soil to feed some little rank wayside poisonous weed, it will seldom seem of much moment in what earth the ditch be dug, by what feet the sward be trod.

He went now on his way seeking work; he did not care what, he asked for any that might serve to use such strength as hunger had left in him, and to give him his daily bread. But this is a great thing to demand in this world, and so he found it.

They repulsed him everywhere.

They had their own people in plenty, they had their st.u.r.dy, tough, weather-beaten women, who labored all day in rain, or snow, or storm, for a pittance, and they had these in larger numbers than their field-work needed. They looked at him askance; this man with the eyes of arctic blue and the grave gestures of a king, who only asked to labor as the lowest among them. He was a stranger to them; he did not speak their tongue with their accent; he looked, with that white beauty and that lofty stature, as though he could crush them in the hollow of his hand.

They would have none of him.

"He brings misfortune!" they said among themselves; and they would have none of him.

He had an evil name with them.

They said at eventide by their wood-fires that strange things had been seen since he had come to the granary by the river.

Once he had painted a study of the wondrous child Zagreus gazing in the fatal mirror, from the pretty face of a stonecutter's little fair son; the child was laughing, happy, healthful at noon, crowned with carnations and river-lilies, and by sunset he was dead--dead like the flowers that were still among his curls.

Once a girl had hired herself as model to him for an Egyptian wanton, half a singer and half a gypsy--handsome, lithe, fantastic, voluptuous: the very night she left the granary she was drowned in crossing a wooden bridge of the river, which gave way under the heavy tramp of a fantoccini player who accompanied her.

Once he had sketched, for the corner of an Oriental study, a rare-plumaged bird of the south, which was the idol of a water-carrier of the district, and the wonder of all the children round: and from that date the bird had sickened, and drooped, and lost its colors, and pined until it died.

The boy's death had been from a sudden seizure of one of the many ills of infancy; the dancing-girl's had come from a common accident due to the rottenness of old worn water-soaked timber; the mocking-bird's had arisen from the cruelty of captivity and the chills of northern winds; all had been the result of simple accident and of natural circ.u.mstance.

But they had sufficed to fill with horror the minds of a peasantry always bigoted and strongly prejudiced against every stranger; and it became to them a matter of implicit credence that whatsoever living thing should be painted by the artist Arslan would a.s.suredly never survive to see the rising of the morrow's sun.

In consequence, for leagues around they shunned him; not man, nor woman, nor child would sit to him as models; and now, when he sought the wage of a daily labor among them, he was everywhere repulsed. He had long repulsed human sympathy, and in its turn it repulsed him.

At last he turned and retraced his steps, baffled and wearied; his early habits had made him familiar with all manner of agricultural toil; he would have done the task of the sower, the herdsman, the hewer of wood, or the charcoal-burner; but they would none of them believe this of one with his glance and his aspect; and solicitation was new to his lips and bitter there as gall.

He took his way back along the line of the river; the beauty of the dawn had gone, the day was only now chilly, heavy with a rank moisture from the steaming soil. Broken boughs and uprooted bushes were floating on the turgid water, and over all the land there hung a sullen fog.

The pressure of the air, the humidity, the colorless stillness that reigned throughout, weighed on lungs which for a score of years had only breathed the pure, strong, rarefied air of the north; he longed with a sudden pa.s.sion to be once more amidst his native mountains under the clear steel-like skies, and beside the rush of the vast wild seas. Were it only to die as he looked on them, it were better to die there than here.

He longed, as men in deserts thirst for drink, for one breath of the strong salt air of the north, one sight of the bright keen sea-born sun as it leapt at dawn from the waters.

The crisp cold nights, the heavens which shone as steel, the forests filled with the cry of the wolves, the mountains which the ocean ceaselessly a.s.sailed, the mighty waves which marched erect like armies, the bitter arctic wind which like a saber cleft the darkness; all these came back to him beloved and beautiful in all their cruelty; desired by him, with a sick longing for their freshness, for their fierceness, for their freedom.

As he dragged his tired limbs through the gra.s.ses and looked out upon the sullen stream that flowed beside him, an oar struck the water, a flat black boat drifted beneath the bank, a wild swan disturbed rose with a hiss from the sedges.

The boat was laden with grain; there was only one rower in it, who steered by a string wound round her foot.

She did not lift her face as she went by him; but her bent brow and her bosom grew red, and she cut the water with a swifter, sharper stroke; her features were turned from him by that movement of her head, but he saw the Eastern outline of the cheek and chin, the embrowned velvet of the skin, the half-bare beauty of the heaving chest and supple spine bent back in the action of the oars, the long, slender, arched shape of the naked foot, round which the cord was twined: their contour and their color struck him with a sudden surprise.

He had seen such oftentimes, eastwards, on the banks of golden rivers, treading, with such feet as these, the sands that were the dust of countless nations; bearing, on such shoulders as these, earthen water-vases that might have served the feasts of Pharaohs; showing such limbs as these against the curled palm branches, and the deep blue sky, upon the desert's edge. But here!--a face of Asia among the cornlands of Northern France? It seemed to him strange; he looked after her with wonder.

The boat went on down the stream without any pause; the sculls cleaving the heavy tide with regular and resolute monotony; the amber piles of the grain and the brown form of the bending figure soon hidden in the clouds of river-mist.

He watched her, only seeing a beggar-girl rowing a skiff full of corn down a sluggish stream. There was nothing to tell him that he was looking upon the savior of his body from the thralls of death; if there had been,--in his mood then,--he would have cursed her.