Читать книгу Growing Up In The West - John Muir - Страница 31

TWENTY-TWO

IN THE NATIONAL Gallery in London there is a picture of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane by Giovanni Bellini. The dawn is wakening and on the high hill to the north the walls of Jerusalem are rosy against a night sky sullenly dissolving away. The garden, a coign of clean and carven rock, a little wave-like shell of stone, lies in a hollow where the shadow is like clear water. In the cup of this shell recline the three disciples in a slumber that looks more like a trance, so rigid are their postures, so blind and rebellious their faces. To the right the basin swells up to a thick frill of rock, where, overlooking the ultimate curved crest of the wave in whose trough the sleepers lie, Christ kneels with arms upraised towards the dark mountains, His face turned away from His followers. He is a powerful, deep-chested man with reddish-fair hair and beard, and one can see that the bars of the cross will take a long time to break Him. In the middle ground, between Jerusalem’s hill and Gethsemane, a handful of soldiers are straggling along a country road. The road does not lead towards Gethsemane but runs at right angles to it, and one might imagine at first that the soldiers are making for some other destination, until one sees that the road presently bends round. Christ’s eyes are lifted to the mountains. Has He seen the soldiers? It is impossible to tell; but if He should turn His head, it will not be the familiar fields and roads that He will see, but a stage on which He can watch, as if it were somebody else’s, the unfolding of His personal fate. And where the road bends towards Him the soldiers will become taller and He will see that their eyes are fixed on Him.

Somewhat like this is the apparently fortuitous and yet deliberate approach of a disease which intends to remain for a long time with its object, and can afford at leisure to fulfil its purposes. All that the watcher may discern at first is a tiny moving shape at the head of some remote mountain path. He watches it with an uneasiness that he cannot explain, for the road forks many times before it passes his house, and there are many populated valleys among the mountains to which it may be going. Presently the path is hidden behind one of the peaks of that country, a mountain so high and broad that it blots the very memory of the traveller from his mind. But several days later he again remembers and looks up towards the mountains. Nothing is moving, the road is bare, and he is about to turn back and walk into his house, when, far nearer than he had thought of looking, he sees the traveller still steadily walking on. His heart contracts; for although still a long distance away, the traveller is now in his valley. When, still at the same deliberate pace, the moving figure turns up the path that leads to the watcher’s door, the watcher retreats a little within the threshold as though to hide himself, and peering out still hopes: Not for me! For my mother, my wife, my child! But not a word is spoken when at last the visitor’s shadow falls across the threshold stone; the householder’s body stiffens for a moment, but then he sits down on a chair and stares at the clear swathe of light falling uninterruptedly now across the doorway.

Afterwards he has no need to strain his eyes looking for his visitor, for they are never separated. Yet he still keeps an anxious watch, but now it is on his wife and mother and child, for though he still lives in his own house, and has indeed inscrutably become a prisoner there, everything has become strangely remote, for his new companion now bears him away on a spectral journey in which all that was once familiar to him recedes to a fabulous distance; and when his wife Helen or his mother speaks to him, often he does not answer, for they are so far away that even if he were to shout his voice would never reach them; and besides his visitor’s silence so encompasses him that he has grown into it.

At the beginning he manages occasionally to shake off his companion’s voiceless converse for a few hours; but the return to it is dreadful. But most dreadful of all is that when he takes off his clothes at night and stretches himself on his bed – from which his wife has been banished, for he has entered on his celibacy – his companion lies down quietly beside him and takes him in his arms. Every morning automatically proffers an instant’s hope; awakening he lies looking at the floor, on which a little strip of light is already stretched, and, his mind vacantly clinging to it, he wonders why the hour should be so late and he still in bed; then he remembers, and the hope stealthily emerges: he cautiously puts out his hand and feels the arm around him. He lies for a little staring into the face beside him on the pillow, and then as though in defiance he feels his arms and the arch of his chest, which are still powerful in spite of all that his enemy has done. He savours his defiance for a little; it is a luxury that he has learned he may safely indulge, for such things as these do not move his companion to retaliation; he may even curse, if the inclination takes him, more, he may insultingly ignore his companion altogether. But all this liberty freely allotted him is only a cheat; suddenly he gazes in front of him as though he had remembered something unpleasant, gets up, and puts on his clothes. As he does so he cannot help once more prodding with the tips of his fingers his arms and legs, which still look round and strong; yet now he is not so sure; he has grown fatter; it is as though he had assumed a new casing of fat as a protection against his enemy, had retreated behind a quivering wall of fat; but it is unavailing, a stupid ruse of the dumb body, and he has ceased to believe in the efficacy of the tissue that so warmly laps him round.

When he sits down to breakfast under the anxious eyes of his mother, once more it is an act of defiance to his visitor. He eats greedily, yet it is an unnatural act, for it is only his body that is eating, and he is aware of the chewed balls of food being driven by a deliberately perverse act of the will down into his stomach, there to enrich his blood and secrete fat to plump his skin. For what? And he feels for a moment that he has been treacherously feeding his enemy. His palate is flat and wooden, and he rises from the table with a hollow nausea, as though he had been participating in an unclean rite. Going outside he walks up and down before the house, slowly, for his left leg jerks forward and swings back again in a strange way, drawn by some external force he has never hitherto been very clearly aware of; it is the force of gravity. He looks at the trees and the stony mountains; once they were a source from which he could draw an infinite supply of health; the cool breath of the leafage refreshed him, the hot breath of the burnt rock lulled his senses; but now everything is hard and sterile; the trees are dead wood and even the leaves are sharp; when autumn comes they will be sharp as blades. His eyes seek the pool lying in shadow in the hollow below the house; he would like to sink far down in it, for then he might get relief; yet he can scarcely tell now whether in that thought of relief the thought of death may not have quietly concealed itself. Nevertheless he feels assuaged, looking at the pool; but then his eyes stray again to the unfriendly trees and hills, and he turns and sees his wife and his mother standing at the door. They too are unfriendly now, for they cannot help him; nothing can help him, neither the cool morning, nor the embalmed evening air. He goes in, the women making way for him, and sits down on the hard chair beside the fireless hearth; for the dead wooden arms of the chair on which his hands rest are no more dead than all those trees standing in their thousands with drooping leaves in the heat; they are nothing but wood, nothing but wood to the core.

So his stationary journey conducts him to more and more arid and waterless regions; but in his dreams his progress is sometimes reversed, and the presence he has been so long accustomed to once more advances upon him as though for the first time. But now it advances with rushing speed. He is in a vast city and he is safe for the moment, for he is lying in a small room at the end of a high-walled street so narrow that it scarcely gives room for a man to pass. His sleep is alarmed by a distant sound, the ghostly brazen clank of some vehicle rushing through the streets. It seems to be miles and miles away, in some distant suburb. Where can it be going? What strange load can it be carrying? He hears it boring its labyrinthine way through stony gullies lit by electric moons like clocks all pointing to the same blank hour; he tries to waken himself, for what if it should be coming to him? But he cannot tear his eyelids open, although the dinning now clashes round him like the waves of a brazen sea, sinking and swelling as the house blocks muffle it and set it free again. Then with a glare of lights the tramcar flashes down on him and hits him full on the head; he puts up his hand and screams. At last he opens his eyes; people are standing round his bed; yes, there they all are, his mother and the rest of them. He looks round; everything in the room is where it had been before; everything is quiet; but his companion has laid his hand, gently, on his head: the laying on of hands. And now, while his mother busies herself with wet cloths, he knows that he must set himself to endure a long ordeal. The pressure is gentle still, but gradually it increases; he sets his teeth, the pain softly bores in and in, he breaks out into words at which his mother turns her face away; but it is of no use, and like a child being whipped he sobs, begging for relief for this one time: the pressure tightens. And to a shadow standing in the dim gaslight he cries: ‘Shoot me, Mansie, shoot me!’ But then as though his companion were only after all tickling him in a particularly ingenious way, his limbs begin to jerk, his face grows red with humiliation and agony, the cry ‘Oh Christ!’ bursts from him, and his arms stretch out like rods, his fingers clench the edge of the bed, the pupils of his open eyes roll round and round like planets whirled out of their orbits, and a long and trembling sigh is expelled through his nostrils, which quiver like those of a snarling dog; it is as though in that long sigh he were trying to breathe out the hard ball of pain. In a little his leaden stupor passes again into sleep.

He awakens next morning shaken and relieved, for having broken him the pain has left its habitation. He lies on in comfortable vacancy, lies longer than usual, and in a half-doze almost forgets his companion. Towards midday he rises and still half in a dream walks up and down before the house. Behind the walls of his dream the trees and hills have receded, and he realises that with a leap last night has borne him on for another great stretch of his invisible journey. And although his senses are still drugged, and he refuses to emerge from the lulling stupor in which he walks, he cannot keep his heart from turning over; yet that spasm is ineffectual and irrelevant, like the straining of a body under an anaesthetic. When he tries to think now of what he would like most in the world, he discovers that his desires cannot reach back beyond the time of his captivity; if he could but be as he was yesterday he would be happy, and the days when he fearfully scanned the mountain path seem an impossible dream.

At last he reaches a stage in his changing progress where he can tell no longer in which world he is moving, that of humanity clothed in the same vesture as his own, or that of his unearthly companion. When neighbours come to the house he looks at their sunburnt faces with distant eyes and cannot quite conceal his aversion; his glance appraisingly runs over their shoulders, arms and legs, as it might over a horse which he would not buy at any price, knowing that it cannot be depended on. Nor do his eyes change whether it is male or female that is reflected in them; he may stare a little longer than is seemly at the outward spout of the women’s breasts, but a sick man has privileges, and although those spheres may bring to his mind, now arid as dried bone, the thought of gushing fountains, their existence seems as mechanical as that of a spring bubbling up and maintaining incessantly its glassy bell-like shape by a perpetual feat of illusion; and besides he has no longer any desire, parched though he is, to drink of those waters. For now he lives in a world of impersonal forces, a world where anything less than infallibility is insufficient and almost shameful, and where there are only straight lines. He has grown so far beyond the normal human stature which men call maturity, that even those who pride themselves on having put away childish things seem to him children or at best clumsy adolescents. For much as they may talk of necessity not one of them understands the word ‘must’; and although they admit perhaps that there is no appeal against and no reprieve from the powers that rule their fates, they are incapable of believing it, for they still hope to escape. And when his mother, perhaps out of over-anxiety, fails to understand some casual sign, he gives her a deadly look; but it is not lack of love or solicitude that he hates her for; it is lack of infallibility, for infallibility is the only thing that can save a man beset by infallible forces.

When he sees this, it is the beginning of despair. Yet sometimes he thinks that if he were a clever man he would be content to give all his mind to the foiling of his enemy, content to pass the rest of his life up to old age in that impersonal and stationary combat; and if in the midst of the fight he should be snatched away by some irrelevant accident, a vulgar epidemic or mere old age, he reflects that he would go willingly, for that too would be a triumph over his enemy. For it is no longer death that he is fighting, but the infallible consummation of an objective process.

So he has to think impersonally and infallibly, and not like ordinary people ruled by such blind motions as love and fear and pity. Yet sometimes it seems to him that this very impersonality which he opposes to his enemy is merely the last capitulation, the habituation to the inevitable. Then in terror he seeks an escape, he flies back to fallible human contacts, and with lowered eyes, ashamed and threatening, dreams of admission to his wife’s bed. But it is a sad and unnatural physiological experiment, a trivial post-mortem ecstasy in an automatic hell where only the flesh still lives. Afterwards he may lie by his wife’s side while the tears flow down his cheeks, but then with averted face he finds himself in his own bed, where he remains in a despair so profound that he does not even notice his companion lying beside him.

In this final redoubt of despair, beleaguered by forces which are neither cruel nor benevolent, but merely pitiless, at the very last moment he appeals to a power beyond them, a power as infinitely loving as they are infinitely without love. And although hitherto he has clearly recognised his sufferings as a dispensation from God, now he appeals to God from them and sees no contradiction in his appeal. Yet – for he has learnt cunning – he does it stealthily, so stealthily that, in spite of his wild desire that God should hear and answer him, he leaves a last hope: the hope that God may not have heard. For if God were to hear and yet not answer, his faith might perish, and dying he might despair even of death. At last, when no answer comes, the hour of resignation breaks in gently and brutally, destroying everything but itself; and he is resigned to all, to God, to his persecution, to his agony, to the fabulous waterless regions through which he is now more and more dizzily whirled, and to the thought of the death of his body.

This last stage is so hateful to human eyes that even the involuntary object of the metamorphosis can hardly be contemplated without a faint but deep feeling of aversion. Those who are nearest him have now perpetually the look that can be seen in the eyes of people returning to their house after saying good-bye to a son or a brother who has set out on a journey from which it is unlikely that he will ever return; it is a look in which despair, resignation and a trace of relief are mingled. And although he has not actually gone away, but still lies there in the bed, they take no pains to conceal this look; they gaze upon him, tenderly but with a little aversion, as on something whose presence is inexplicably troubling, with those eyes that have already said farewell. This aversion lasts until the final moment of metamorphosis. But then hatred both of death and his victim falls away, and in astonishment the living see that something stranger than they could ever have imagined has been accomplished. And looking at the face, so remote now that even the white sheet that touches it seems to have far more of the pathetic associations of mortality, they are wafted on to a shore so strange that they can find no name for it; they stand on the very edge of Time, they stand there as in a sleep, and dread lest they might awaken and Time be no longer there with them.