Folle Farine Part 39

The boat glided into the fog which closed behind it: a flock of water-birds swam out from the rushes and darted at some floating kernels of wheat that had fallen over the vessel's side; they fought and hissed, and flapped and pecked among themselves over the chance plunder; a large rat stole amidst them unnoticed by them in their exultation, and seized their leader and bore him struggling and beating the air with blood-stained wings away to a hole in the bank; a mongrel dog, prowling on the sh.o.r.e, hearing the wild duck's cries, splashed into the sedges, and swam out and gripped the rat by the neck in bold sharp fangs, and bore both rat and bird, bleeding and dying, to the land; the owner of the mongrel, a peasant, making ready the soil for colza in the low-lying fields, s.n.a.t.c.hed the duck from the dog to bear it home for his own eating, and kicked his poor beast in the ribs for having ventured to stray without leave and to do him service without permission. "The dulcet harmony of the world's benignant law," thought Arslan, as he turned aside to enter the stone archway of his own desolate dwelling.

"To live one must slaughter--what life can I take?"

At that moment the setting sun pierced the heavy veil of the vapor, and glowed through the fog.

The boat, now distant, glided for a moment into the ruddy haze, and was visible; the water around it, like a lake of flame, the white steam above it like the smoke of a sacrifice fire.

Then the sun sank, the mists gathered closely once more, all light faded, and the day was dead.

He felt stifled and sick at heart as he returned along the reedy sh.o.r.e towards his dreary home. He wondered dully why his life would not end: since the world would have none of him, neither the work of his brain nor the work of his hands, it seemed that he had no place in it.

He was half resolved to lie down in the water there, among the reeds, and let it flow over his face and breast, and kiss him softly and coldly into the sleep of death. He had desired this many times; what held him back from its indulgence was not "the child within us that fears death,"

of which Plato speaks; he had no such misgiving in him, and he believed death to be a simple rupture and end of all things, such as any man had right to seek and summon for himself; it was rather that the pa.s.sion of his art was too strong in him, that the power to create was too intense in him, so that he could not willingly consign the forces and the fantasies of his brain to that a.s.similation to which he would, without thought or pause, have flung his body.

As he entered the haunted hall which served him as his painting-room, he saw a fresh fire of logs upon the hearth; whose leaping flames lighted the place with cheerful color, and he saw on the stone bench fresh food, sufficient to last several days, and a bra.s.s flagon filled with wine.

A curious emotion took possession of him as he looked. It was less surprise at the fact, for his senses told him that it was the work of some charity which chose to hide itself, than it was wonder as to who, in this strange land, where none would even let him earn his daily bread, knew enough or cared enough to supply his necessities thus. And with this there arose the same intolerant bitterness of the degradation of alms, the same ungrateful hatred of the succor that seemed to cla.s.s him among beggars, which had moved him when he had awakened with the dawn.

He felt neither tenderness nor grat.i.tude, he was only conscious of humiliation.

There were in him a certain coldness, strength, and indifference to sympathy, which, whilst they made his greatness as an artist, made his callousness as a man. It might have been sweet to others to find themselves thus remembered and pitied by another at an hour when their forces were spent, their fate friendless, and their hopes all dead. But it was not so to him, he only felt like the desert animal which, wounded, repulses every healing hand, and only seeks to die alone.

There was only one vulnerable, one tender, nerve in him, and this was the instinct of his genius. He had been nurtured in hardihood, and had drawn in endurance with every breath of his native air; he would have borne physical ills without one visible pang, and would have been indifferent to all mortal suffering; but for the powers in him for the art he adored, he had a child's weakness, a woman's softness.

He could not bear to die without leaving behind his life some work the world would cherish.

Call it folly, call it madness, it is both; the ivory Zeus that was to give its sculptor immortality lives but in tradition; the bronze Athene that was to guard the Piraeus in eternal liberty has long been leveled with the dust; yet with every age the artist still gives life for fame, still cries, "Let my body perish, but make my work immortal!"

It was this in him now which stirred his heart with a new and gentler emotion; emotion which, while half disgust was also half gladness. This food was alms-given, since he had not earned it, and yet--by means of this sheer bodily subsistence--it would be possible for him to keep alive those dreams, that strength by which he still believed it in him to compel his fame from men.

He stood before the Phoebus in Pherae, thinking; it stung him with a bitter torment; it humiliated him with a hateful burden--this debt which came he knew not whence, and which he never might be able to repay. And yet his heart was strangely moved; it seemed to him that the fate which thus wantonly, and with such curious persistence, placed life back into his hands, must needs be one that would bear no common fruit.

He opposed himself no more to it. He bent his head and broke bread, and ate and drank of the red wine:--he did not thank G.o.d or man as he broke his fast; he only looked in the mocking eyes of Hermes, and said in his heart:

"Since I must live, I will triumph."

And Hermes smiled: Hermes the wise, who had bought and sold the generations of men so long ago in the golden age, and who knew so well how they would barter away their greatness and their gladness, their bodies and their souls, for one sweet strain of his hollow reed pipe, for one sweet glance of his soulless Pandora's eyes.

Hermes--Hermes the liar, Hermes the wise--knew how men's oaths were kept.

CHAPTER II.

At the close of that day Claudis Flamma discovered that he had been robbed--robbed more than once: he swore and raved and tore his hair for loss of a little bread and meat and oil and a flagon of red wine. He did not suspect his granddaughter; accusing her perpetually of sins of which she was innocent, he did not once a.s.sociate her in thought with the one offense which she had committed. He thought that the window of his storehouse had been forced from the exterior; he made no doubt that his spoiler was some vagabond from one of the river barges. Through such tramps his henhouse and his apple-lofts had often previously been invaded.

She heard his lamentations and imprecations in unbroken silence; he did not question her; and without a lie she was able to keep her secret.

In her own sight she had done a foul thing--a thing that her own hunger had never induced her to do. She did not seek to reconcile herself to her action by any reflection that she had only taken what she had really earned a thousand times over by her service; her mind was not sufficiently instructed, and was of too truthful a mould to be capable of the deft plea of a sophistry. She could dare the thing; and do it, and hold her peace about it, though she should be scourged to speak; but she could not tamper with it to excuse it to herself; for this she had neither the cunning nor the cowardice.

Why had she done it?--done for a stranger what no pressure of need had made her do for her own wants? She did not ask herself; she followed her instinct. He allured her with his calm and kingly beauty, which was like nothing else her eyes had ever seen; and she was drawn by an irresistible attraction to this life which she had bought at the price of her own from the G.o.ds. Yet stronger even than this sudden human pa.s.sion which had entered into her was the dread lest he whom she had ransomed from his death should he know his debt to her.

Under such a dread, she never opened her lips to any one on this thing which she had done. Silence was natural to her; she spoke so rarely, that many in the province believed her to be dumb; no sympathy had ever been shown to her to woo her to disclose either the pa.s.sions that burned latent in her veins, or the tenderness that trembled stifled in her heart.

Thrice again did she take food and fuel to the water-tower undetected, both by the man whom she robbed, and the man whom she succored. Thrice again did she find her way to the desolate chamber in its owner's absence and refill the empty platters and warm afresh the cold blank hearth. Thrice again did Claudis Flamma note the diminution of his stores, and burnish afresh his old rusty fowling-piece, and watch half the night on his dark staircase, and prepare with his own hands a jar of poisoned honey and a bag of poisoned wheat, which he placed, with a cruel chuckle of grim glee, to tempt the eyes of his spoilers.

But the spoiler being of his own household, saw this trap set, and was aware of it.

In a week or two the need for these acts which she hated ceased. She learned that the stranger for whom she thus risked her body and soul, had found a boatman's work upon the water, which, although a toil rough and rude, and but poorly paid, still sufficed to give him bread. Though she herself was so pressed with hunger, many a time, that as she went through the meadows and hedge-rows she was glad to crush in her teeth the tender shoots of the briers and the acrid berry of the brambles, she never again, unbidden, touched so much as a mouldy crust thrown out to be eaten by the poultry.

Flamma, counting his possessions greedily night and morning, blessed the saints for the renewed safety of his dwelling, and cast forth the poisoned wheat as a thank-offering to the male birds who were forever flying to and fro their nested mates in the leafless boughs above the earliest violets, and whose little throats were strangled even in their glad flood of nuptial song, and whose soft bright eyes grew dull in death ere even they had looked upon the springtide sun.

For it was thus ever that Folle-Farine saw men praise G.o.d.

She took their death to her own door, sorrowing and full of remorse.

"Had I never stolen the food, these birds might never have perished,"

she thought, as she saw the rosy throats of the robins and bullfinches turned upward in death on the turf.

She blamed herself bitterly with an aching heart.

The fatality which makes human crime recoil on the innocent creatures of the animal world oppressed her with its heavy and hideous injustice.

Their G.o.d was good, they said: yet for her sin and her grandsire's greed the harmless song-birds died by the score in torment.

"How shall a G.o.d be good who is not just?" she thought. In this mute young lonely soul of hers Nature had sown a strong pa.s.sion for justice, a strong instinct towards what was righteous.

As the germ of a plant born in darkness underground will, by sheer instinct, uncurl its colorless tendrils, and thrust them through crevices and dust, and the close structure of mortared stones, until they reach the light and grow green and strong in it, so did her nature strive, of its own accord, through the gloom enveloping it; towards those moral laws which in all ages and all lands remain the same, no matter what deity be worshiped, or what creed be called the truth.

Her nascent mind was darkened, oppressed, bewildered, perplexed, even like the plant which, forcing itself upward from its cellar, opens its leaves not in pure air and under a blue sky, but in the reek and smoke and fetid odors of a city.

Yet, like the plant, she vaguely felt that light was somewhere; and as vaguely sought it.

With most days she took her grandsire's boat to and fro the town, fetching or carrying; there was no mode of transit so cheap to him as this, whose only cost was her fatigue. With each pa.s.sage up and down the river, she pa.s.sed by the dwelling of Arslan.

Sometimes she saw him; once or twice, in the twilight, he spoke to her; she only bent her head to hide her face from him, and rowed more quickly on her homeward way in silence. At other times, in his absence, and when she was safe from any detection, she entered the dismal solitudes wherein he labored, and gazed in rapt and awed amazement at the shapes that were shadowed forth upon the walls.

The service by which he gained his daily bread was on the waters, and took him often leagues away--simple hardy toil, among fishers and ca.n.a.l-carriers and barge-men. But it left him some few days, and all his nights, free for art; and never in all the years of his leisure had his fancy conceived, and his hand created, more exquisite dreams and more splendid fantasies than now in this bitter and cheerless time, when he labored amidst the poorest for the bare bread of life.

"Des belles choses peuvent se faire dans une cave:" and in truth the gloom of the cellar gives birth to an art more sublime than the light of the palace can ever beget.

Suffering shortens the years of the artist, and kills him oftentimes ere his prime be reached; but in suffering alone are all great works conceived.

The senses, the pa.s.sions, the luxuries, the l.u.s.ts of the flesh, the deliriums of the desires, the colors, the melodies, the fragrance, the indolences,--all that make the mere "living of life" delightful, all go to enrich and to deepen the human genius which steeps itself in them; but it is in exile from these that alone it can rise to its greatest.

The gra.s.s of the Holy River gathers perfume from the marvelous suns and the moonless nights, and the gorgeous bloom of the East, from the aromatic breath of the leopard and the perfume of the fallen pomegranate; from the sacred oil that floats in the lamps, and the caress of the girl-bathers' feet and the myrrh-dropping unguents that glide from the maidens' bare limbs in the moonlight,--the gra.s.s holds and feeds on them all. But not till the gra.s.s has been torn from the roots, and been crushed, and been bruised and destroyed, can the full odors exhale of all it has tasted and treasured.

Even thus the imagination of man may be great, but it can never be at its greatest until one serpent, with merciless fangs, has bitten it through and through, and impregnated it with pa.s.sion and with poison--that one deathless serpent which is Memory.