The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences Part 4

I picked myself up from the edge of the causeway, aching and sore from head to foot, scarcely able to move, yet conscious that if I did not get myself out of the way, one or other of the vehicles which were dashing along would run over me. It would be impossible to describe the miserable sensations, both of body and mind, with which I dragged myself across the crowded pavement, not without curses and even kicks from the pa.s.sers-by, and avoiding the shop from which I still heard those shrieks of devilish laughter, gathered myself up in the shelter of a little projection of a wall, where I was for the moment safe. The pain which I felt was as nothing to the sense of humiliation, the mortification, the rage with which I was possessed. There is nothing in existence more dreadful than rage which is impotent, which cannot punish or avenge, which has to restrain itself and put up with insults showered upon it. I had never known before what that helpless, hideous exasperation was; and I was humiliated beyond description, brought down--I, whose inclination it was to make more of myself than was justifiable--to the aspect of a miserable ruffian beaten in a brawl, soiled, covered with mud and dust, my clothes torn, my face bruised and disfigured,--all this within half an hour or there about of my arrival in a strange place where n.o.body knew me or could do me justice! I kept looking out feverishly for some one with an air of authority to whom I could appeal. Sooner or later somebody must go by, who, seeing me in such a plight, must inquire how it came about, must help me and vindicate me. I sat there for I cannot tell how long, expecting every moment that were it but a policeman, somebody would notice and help me; but no one came. Crowds seemed to sweep by without a pause,--all hurrying, restless; some with anxious faces, as if any delay would be mortal; some in noisy groups intercepting the pa.s.sage of the others. Sometimes one would pause to point me out to his comrades with a shout of derision at my miserable plight, or if by a change of posture I got outside the protection of my wall, would kick me back with a coa.r.s.e injunction to keep out of the way. No one was sorry for me; not a look of compa.s.sion, not a word of inquiry was wasted upon me; no representative of authority appeared. I saw a dozen quarrels while I lay there, cries of the weak, and triumphant shouts of the strong; but that was all.

I was drawn after a while from the fierce and burning sense of my own grievances by a querulous voice quite close to me. 'This is my corner,'

it said. 'I've sat here for years, and I have a right to it. And here you come, you big ruffian, because you know I haven't got the strength to push you away.'

'Who are you?' I said, turning round horror-stricken; for close beside me was a miserable man, apparently in the last stage of disease. He was pale as death, yet eaten up with sores. His body was agitated by a nervous trembling. He seemed to shuffle along on hands and feet, as though the ordinary mode of locomotion was impossible to him, and yet was in possession of all his limbs. Pain was written in his face. I drew away to leave him room, with mingled pity and horror that this poor wretch should be the partner of the only shelter I could find within so short a time of my arrival. I who--It was horrible, shameful, humiliating; and yet the suffering in his wretched face was so evident that I could not but feel a pang of pity too. 'I have nowhere to go,' I said. 'I am--a stranger. I have been badly used, and n.o.body seems to care.'

'No,' he said, 'n.o.body cares; don't you look for that. Why should they?

Why, you look as if you were sorry for _me!_ What a joke!' he murmured to himself,--'what a joke! Sorry for some one else! What a fool the fellow must be!'

'You look,' I said, 'as if you were suffering horribly; and you say you have come here for years.'

'Suffering! I should think I was,' said the sick man; 'but what is that to you? Yes; I've been here for years,--oh, years! that means nothing,--for longer than can be counted. Suffering is not the word. It's torture; it's agony! But who cares? Take your leg out of my way.'

I drew myself out of his way from a sort of habit, though against my will, and asked, from habit too, 'Are you never any better than now?'

He looked at me more closely, and an air of astonishment came over his face. 'What d'ye want here,' he said, 'pitying a man? That's something new here. No; I'm not always so bad, if you want to know. I get better, and then I go and do what makes me bad again, and that's how it will go on; and I choose it to be so, and you needn't bring any of your d----d pity here.'

'I may ask, at least, why aren't you looked after? Why don't you get into some hospital?' I said.

'Hospital!' cried the sick man, and then he too burst out into that furious laugh, the most awful sound I ever had heard. Some of the pa.s.sers-by stopped to hear what the joke was, and surrounded me with once more a circle of mockers.

'Hospitals! perhaps you would like a whole Red Cross Society, with ambulances and all arranged?' cried one. 'Or the _Misericordia_!' shouted another. I sprang up to my feet, crying, 'Why not?' with an impulse of rage which gave me strength. Was I never to meet with anything but this fiendish laughter? 'There's some authority, I suppose,' I cried in my fury. 'It is not the rabble that is the only master here, I hope.' But n.o.body took the least trouble to hear what I had to say for myself. The last speaker struck me on the mouth, and called me an accursed fool for talking of what I did not understand; and finally they all swept on and pa.s.sed away.

I had been, as I thought, severely injured when I dragged myself into that corner to save myself from the crowd; but I sprang up now as if nothing had happened to me. My wounds had disappeared; my bruises were gone. I was as I had been when I dropped, giddy and amazed, upon the same pavement, how long--an hour?--before? It might have been an hour, it might have been a year, I cannot tell. The light was the same as ever, the thunderous atmosphere unchanged. Day, if it was day, had made no progress; night, if it was evening, had come no nearer,--all was the same.

As I went on again presently, with a vexed and angry spirit, regarding on every side around me the endless surging of the crowd, and feeling a loneliness, a sense of total abandonment and solitude, which I cannot describe, there came up to me a man of remarkable appearance. That he was a person of importance, of great knowledge and information, could not be doubted. He was very pale, and of a worn but commanding aspect. The lines of his face were deeply drawn; his eyes were sunk under high arched brows, from which they looked out as from caves, full of a fiery impatient light. His thin lips were never quite without a smile; but it was not a smile in which any pleasure was. He walked slowly, not hurrying, like most of the pa.s.sengers. He had a reflective look, as if pondering many things. He came up to me suddenly, without introduction or preliminary, and took me by the arm. 'What object had you in talking of these antiquated inst.i.tutions?' he said. And I saw in his mind the gleam of the thought, which seemed to be the first with all, that I was a fool, and that it was the natural thing to wish me harm, just as in the earth above it was the natural thing, professed at least, to wish well,--to say, Good-morning, good-day, by habit and without thought. In this strange country the stranger was received with a curse, and it woke an answer not unlike the hasty 'Curse you, then, also!' which seemed to come without any will of mine through my mind. But this provoked only a smile from my new friend. He took no notice. He was disposed to examine me, to find some amus.e.m.e.nt perhaps--how could I tell?--in what I might say.

'What antiquated things?'

'Are you still so slow of understanding? What were they--hospitals? The pretences of a world that can still deceive itself. Did you expect to find them here?'

'I expected to find--how should I know?' I said, bewildered--'some shelter for a poor wretch where he could be cared for, not to be left there to die in the street. Expected! I never thought. I took it for granted--'

'To die in the street!' he cried with a smile and a shrug of his shoulders. 'You'll learn better by and by. And if he did die in the street, what then? What is that to you?'

'To me!' I turned and looked at him, amazed; but he had somehow shut his soul, so that I could see nothing but the deep eyes in their caves, and the smile upon the close-shut mouth. 'No more to me than to any one. I only spoke for humanity's sake, as--a fellow-creature.'

My new acquaintance gave way to a silent laugh within himself, which was not so offensive as the loud laugh of the crowd, but yet was more exasperating than words can say. 'You think that matters? But it does not hurt you that he should he in pain. It would do you no good if he were to get well. Why should you trouble yourself one way or the other? Let him die--if he can--That makes no difference to you or me.'

'I must be dull indeed,' I cried,--'slow of understanding, as you say.

This is going back to the ideas of times beyond knowledge--before Christianity--' As soon as I had said this I felt somehow--I could not tell how--as if my voice jarred, as if something false and unnatural was in what I said. My companion gave my arm a twist as if with a shock of surprise, then laughed in his inward way again.

'We don't think much of that here, nor of your modern pretences in general. The only thing that touches you and me is what hurts or helps ourselves. To be sure, it all comes to the same thing,--for I suppose it annoys you to see that wretch writhing; it hurts your more delicate, highly-cultivated consciousness.'

'It has nothing to do with my consciousness,' I cried angrily; 'it is a shame to let a fellow-creature suffer if we can prevent it.'

'Why shouldn't he suffer?' said my companion. We pa.s.sed as he spoke some other squalid, wretched creatures shuffling among the crowd, whom he kicked with his foot, calling forth a yell of pain and curses. This he regarded with a supreme contemptuous calm which stupefied me. Nor did any of the pa.s.sers-by show the slightest inclination to take the part of the sufferers. They laughed, or shouted out a gibe, or what was still more wonderful, went on with a complete unaffected indifference, as if all this was natural. I tried to disengage my arm in horror and dismay, but he held me fast with a pressure that hurt me. 'That's the question,' he said. 'What have we to do with it? Your fict.i.tious consciousness makes it painful to you. To me, on the contrary, who take the view of nature, it is a pleasurable feeling. It enhances the amount of ease, whatever that may be, which I enjoy. I am in no pain. That brute who is'--and he flicked with a stick he carried the uncovered wound of a wretch upon the roadside--'makes me more satisfied with my condition. Ah! you think it is I who am the brute? You will change your mind by and by.'

'Never!' I cried, wrenching my arm from his with an effort, 'if I should live a hundred years.'

'A hundred years,--a drop in the bucket!' he said with his silent laugh.

'You will live forever, and you will come to my view; and we shall meet in the course of ages, from time to time, to compare notes. I would say good-by after the old fashion, but you are but newly arrived, and I will not treat you so badly as that.' With which he parted from me, waving his hand, with his everlasting horrible smile.

'Good-by!' I said to myself, 'good-by! why should it be treating me badly to say good-by--'

I was startled by a buffet on the mouth. 'Take that!' cried some one, 'to teach you how to wish the worst of tortures to people who have done you no harm.'

'What have I said? I meant no harm; I repeated only what is the commonest civility, the merest good manners.'

'You wished,' said the man who had struck me,--'I won't repeat the words: to me, for it was I only that heard them, the awful company that hurts most, that sets everything before us, both past and to come, and cuts like a sword and burns like fire. I'll say it to yourself, and see how it feels. G.o.d be with you! There! it is said, and we all must bear it, thanks, you fool and accursed, to you.'

And then there came a pause over all the place, an awful stillness,--hundreds of men and women standing clutching with desperate movements at their hearts as if to tear them out, moving their heads as if to dash them against the wall, wringing their hands, with a look upon all their convulsed faces which I can never forget. They all turned to me, cursing me with those horrible eyes of anguish. And everything was still; the noise all stopped for a moment, the air all silent, with a silence that could be felt. And then suddenly out of the crowd there came a great piercing cry; and everything began again exactly as before.

While this pause occurred, and while I stood wondering, bewildered, understanding nothing, there came over me a darkness, a blackness, a sense of misery such as never in all my life--though I have known troubles enough--I had felt before. All that had happened to me throughout my existence seemed to rise pale and terrible in a hundred scenes before me,--all momentary, intense, as if each was the present moment. And in each of these scenes I saw what I had never seen before. I saw where I had taken the wrong instead of the right step, in what wantonness, with what self-will it had been done; how G.o.d (I shuddered at the name) had spoken and called me, and even entreated, and I had withstood and refused. All the evil I had done came back, and spread itself out before my eyes; and I loathed it, yet knew that I had chosen it, and that it would be with me forever. I saw it all in the twinkling of an eye, in a moment, while I stood there, and all men with me, in the horror of awful thought. Then it ceased as it had come, instantaneously, and the noise and the laughter, and the quarrels and cries, and all the commotion of this new bewildering place, in a moment began again. I had seen no one while this strange paroxysm lasted. When it disappeared, I came to myself, emerging as from a dream, and looked into the face of the man whose words, not careless like mine, had brought it upon us. Our eyes met, and his were surrounded by curves and lines of anguish which were terrible to see.

'Well,' he said with a short laugh, which was forced and harsh, 'how do you like it? that is what happens when--If it came often, who could endure it?' He was not like the rest. There was no sneer upon his face, no gibe at my simplicity. Even now, when all had recovered, he was still quivering with something that looked like a n.o.bler pain. His face was very grave, the lines deeply drawn in it; and he seemed to be seeking no amus.e.m.e.nt or distraction, nor to take any part in the noise and tumult which was going on around.

'Do you know what that cry meant?' he said. 'Did you hear that cry? It was some one who saw--even here once in a long time, they say, it can be seen--'

'What can be seen?'

He shook his head, looking at me with a meaning which I could not interpret. It was beyond the range of my thoughts. I came to know after, or I never could have made this record. But on that subject he said no more. He turned the way I was going, though it mattered nothing what way I went, for all were the same to me. 'You are one of the new-comers?' he said; 'you have not been long here--'

'Tell me,' I cried, 'what you mean by _here_. Where are we? How can one tell who has fallen--he knows not whence or where? What is this place? I have never seen anything like it. It seems to me that I hate it already, though I know not what it is.'

He shook his head once more. 'You will hate it more and more,' he said; 'but of these dreadful streets you will never be free, unless--' And here he stopped again.

'Unless--what? If it is possible, I will be free of them, and that before long.'

He smiled at me faintly, as we smile at children, but not with derision.

'How shall you do that? Between this miserable world and all others, there is a great gulf fixed. It is full of all the bitterness and tears that come from all the universe. These drop from them, but stagnate here.

We, you perceive, have no tears, not even at moments--' Then, 'You will soon be accustomed to all this,' he said. 'You will fall into the way.

Perhaps you will be able to amuse yourself to make it pa.s.sable. Many do.

There are a number of fine things to be seen here. If you are curious, come with me and I will show you. Or work,--there is even work. There is only one thing that is impossible, or if not impossible--' And here he paused again and raised his eyes to the dark clouds and lurid sky overhead. 'The man who gave that cry! if I could but find him! he must have seen--'

'What could he see?' I asked. But there arose in my mind something like contempt. A visionary! who could not speak plainly, who broke off into mysterious inferences, and appeared to know more than he would say. It seemed foolish to waste time, when evidently there was still so much to see, in the company of such a man; and I began already to feel more at home. There was something in that moment of anguish which had wrought a strange familiarity in me with my surroundings. It was so great a relief to return out of the misery of that sharp and horrible self-realization, to what had come to be, in comparison, easy and well known. I had no desire to go back and grope among the mysteries and anguish so suddenly revealed. I was glad to be free from them, to be left to myself, to get a little pleasure perhaps like the others. While these thoughts pa.s.sed through my mind, I had gone on without any active impulse of my own, as everybody else did; and my latest companion had disappeared. He saw, no doubt, without any need for words, what my feelings were. And I proceeded on my way. I felt better as I got more accustomed to the place, or perhaps it was the sensation of relief after that moment of indescribable pain. As for the sights in the streets, I began to grow used to them. The wretched creatures who strolled or sat about with signs of sickness or wounds upon them disgusted me only, they no longer called forth my pity.

I began to feel ashamed of my silly questions about the hospital. All the same, it would have been a good thing to have had some receptacle for them, into which they might have been driven out of the way. I felt an inclination to push them aside as I saw other people do, but was a little ashamed of that impulse too; and so I went on. There seemed no quiet streets, so far as I could make out, in the place. Some were smaller, meaner, with a different kind of pa.s.sengers, but the same hubbub and unresting movement everywhere. I saw no signs of melancholy or seriousness; active pain, violence, brutality, the continual shock of quarrels and blows, but no pensive faces about, no sorrowfulness, nor the kind of trouble which brings thought. Everybody was fully occupied, pushing on as if in a race, pausing for nothing.

The glitter of the lights, the shouts, and sounds of continual going, the endless whirl of pa.s.sers-by, confused and tired me after a while. I went as far out as I could go to what seemed the out-skirts of the place, where I could by glimpses perceive a low horizon all lurid and glowing, which seemed to sweep round and round. Against it in the distance stood up the outline, black against that red glow, of other towers and house-tops, so many and great that there was evidently another town between us and the sunset, if sunset it was. I have seen a western sky like it when there were storms about, and all the colors of the sky were heightened and darkened by angry influences. The distant town rose against it, cutting the firmament so that it might have been tongues of flame flickering between the dark solid outlines; and across the waste open country which lay between the two cities, there came a distant hum like the sound of the sea, which was in reality the roar of that other mult.i.tude. The country between showed no greenness or beauty; it lay dark under the dark overhanging sky. Here and there seemed a cl.u.s.ter of giant trees scathed as if by lightning, their bare boughs standing up as high as the distant towers, their trunks like black columns without foliage.

Openings here and there, with glimmering lights, looked like the mouths of mines; but of pa.s.sengers there were scarcely any. A figure here and there flew along as if pursued, imperfectly seen, a shadow only a little darker than the s.p.a.ce about. And in contrast with the sound of the city, here was no sound at all, except the low roar on either side, and a vague cry or two from the openings of the mine,--a scene all drawn in darkness, in variations of gloom, deriving scarcely any light at all from the red and gloomy burning of that distant evening sky.

A faint curiosity to go forwards, to see what the mines were, perhaps to get a share in what was brought up from them, crossed my mind. But I was afraid of the dark, of the wild uninhabited savage look of the landscape; though when I thought of it, there seemed no reason why a narrow stretch of country between two great towns should be alarming. But the impression was strong and above reason. I turned back to the street in which I had first alighted, and which seemed to end in a great square full of people.

In the middle there was a stage erected, from which some one was delivering an oration or address of some sort. He stood beside a long table, upon which lay something which I could not clearly distinguish, except that it seemed alive, and moved, or rather writhed with convulsive twitchings, as if trying to get free of the bonds which confined it.

Round the stage in front were a number of seats occupied by listeners, many of whom were women, whose interest seemed to be very great, some of them being furnished with note-books; while a great unsettled crowd coming and going, drifted round,--many, arrested for a time as they pa.s.sed, proceeding on their way when the interest flagged, as is usual to such open-air a.s.semblies. I followed two of those who pushed their way to within a short distance of the stage, and who were strong, big men, more fitted to elbow the crowd aside than I, after my rough treatment in the first place, and the agitation I had pa.s.sed through, could be. I was glad, besides, to take advantage of the explanation which one was giving to the other. 'It's always fun to see this fellow demonstrate,' he said, 'and the subject to-day's a capital one. Let's get well forward, and see all that's going on.'

'Which subject do you mean?' said the other; 'the theme or the example?'

And they both laughed, though I did not seize the point of the wit.