Читать книгу Ardath - Marie Corelli - Страница 13

His question was not very promptly answered. The stranger stood still, regarding him intently for two of three minutes with a look of peculiar pensiveness and abstraction, the heavy double fringe of his long dark lashes giving an almost drowsy pathos to his proud and earnest eyes. Soon, however, this absorbed expression changed to one of sombre scorn.

"The world!" he said slowly and bitterly. "You think I care for the world? Then you read me wrongly at the very outset of our interview, and your once reputed skill as a Seer goes for naught! To me the world is a graveyard full of dead, worm-eaten things, and its supposititious Creator, whom you have so be praised in your orisons to-night, is the Sexton who entombs, and the Ghoul who devours his own hapless Creation! I myself am one of the tortured and dying, and I have sought you simply that you may trick me into a brief oblivion of my doom, and mock me with the mirage of a life that is not and can never be! How can you serve me? Give me a few hours' respite from wretchedness! that is all I ask!"

As he spoke his face grew blanched and haggard, as though he suffered from some painfully repressed inward agony. The monk Heliobas heard him with an air of attentive patience, but said nothing; he therefore, after waiting for a reply and receiving none, went on in colder and more even tones:

"I dare say my words seem strange to you—though they should not do so if, as reported, you have studied all the varying phases of that purely intellectual despair which, in this age of excessive over-culture, crushes men who learn too much and think too deeply. But before going further I had better introduce myself. My name is Alwyn …"

"Theos Alwyn, the English author, I presume?" interposed the monk interrogatively.

"Why, yes!" this in accents of extreme surprise—"how did you know that!"

"Your celebrity," politely suggested Heliobas, with a wave of the hand and an enigmatical smile that might have meant anything or nothing.

Alwyn colored a little. "Your mistake," he said indifferently, "I have no celebrity. The celebrities of my country are few, and among them those most admired are jockeys and divorced women. I merely follow in the rear-line of the art or profession of literature—I am that always unluckiest and most undesirable kind of an author, a writer of verse—I lay no claim, not now at any rate, to the title of poet. While recently staying in Paris I chanced to hear of you …"

The monk bowed ever so slightly—there was a dawning gleam of satire in his brilliant eyes.

"You won special distinction and renown there, I believe, before you adopted this monastic life?" pursued Alwyn, glancing at him curiously.

"Did I?" and Heliobas looked cheerfully interested. "Really I was not aware of it, I assure you! Possibly my ways and doings may have occasionally furnished the Parisians with something to talk about instead of the weather, and I know I made some few friends and an astonishing number of enemies, if that is what you mean by distinction and renown!"

Alwyn smiled—his smile was always reluctant, and had in it more of sadness than sweetness, yet it gave his features a singular softness and beauty, just as a ray of sunlight falling on a dark picture will brighten the tints into a momentary warmth of seeming life.

"All reputation means that, I think," he said, "unless it be mediocre—then one is safe; one has scores of friends, and scarce a foe. Mediocrity succeeds wonderfully well nowadays—nobody hates it, because every one feels how easily they themselves can attain to it. Exceptional talent is aggressive—actual genius is offensive; people are insulted to have a thing held up for their admiration which is entirely out of their reach. They become like bears climbing a greased pole; they see a great name above them—a tempting sugary morsel which they would fain snatch and devour—and when their uncouth efforts fail, they huddle together on the ground beneath, look up with dull, peering eyes, and impotently snarl! But you,"—and here his gazed rested doubtfully, yet questioningly, on his companion's open, serene countenance—"you, if rumor speaks truly, should have been able to tame YOUR bears and turn them into dogs, humble and couchant! Your marvellous achievements as a mesmerist—"

"Excuse me!" returned Heliobas quietly, "I never was a mesmerist."

"Well-as a spiritualist then; though I cannot admit the existence of any such thing as spiritualism."

"Neither can I," returned Heliobas, with perfect good-humor, "according to the generally accepted meaning of the term. Pray go on, Mr. Alwyn!"

Alwyn looked at him, a little puzzled and uncertain how to proceed. A curious sense of irritation was growing up in his mind against this monk with the grand head and flashing eyes—eyes that seemed to strip bare his innermost thoughts, as lightning strips bark from a tree.

"I was told," he continued after a pause, during which he had apparently considered and prepared his words, "that you were chiefly known in Paris as being the possessor of some mysterious internal force—call it magnetic, hypnotic, or spiritual, as you please—which, though perfectly inexplicable, was yet plainly manifested and evident to all who placed themselves under your influence. Moreover, that by this force you were able to deal scientifically and practically with the active principle of intelligence in man, to such an extent that you could, in some miraculous way, disentangle the knots of toil and perplexity in an over-taxed brain, and restore to it its pristine vitality and vigor. Is this true? If so, exert your power upon me,—for something, I know not what, has of late frozen up the once overflowing fountain of my thoughts, and I have lost all working ability. When a man can no longer work, it were best he should die, only unfortunately I cannot die unless I kill myself,—which it is possible I may do ere long. But in the meantime,"—he hesitated a moment, then went on, "in the meantime, I have a strong wish to be deluded—I use the word advisedly, and repeat it—DELUDED into an imaginary happiness, though I am aware that as an agnostic and searcher after truth—truth absolute, truth positive—such a desire on my part seems even to myself inconsistent and unreasonable. Still I confess to having it; and therein, I know, I betray the weakness of my nature. It may be that I am tired "—and he passed his hand across his brow with a troubled gesture—"or puzzled by the infinite, incurable distress of all living things. Perhaps I am growing mad!—who knows!—but whatever my condition, you,—if report be correct,—have the magic skill to ravish the mind away from its troubles and transport it to a radiant Elysium of sweet illusions and ethereal ecstasies. Do this for me, as you have done it for others, and whatever payment you demand, whether in gold or gratitude, shall be yours."

He ceased; the wind howled furiously outside, flinging gusty dashes of rain against the one window of the room, a tall arched casement that clattered noisily with every blow inflicted upon it by the storm. Heliobas gave him a swift, searching glance, half pitying, half disdainful.

"Haschisch or opium should serve your turn," he said curtly. "I know of no other means whereby to temporarily still the clamorings of conscience."

Alwyn flushed darkly. "Conscience!" he began in rather a resentful tone,

"Aye, conscience!" repeated Heliobas firmly. "There is such a thing. Do you profess to be wholly without it?"

Alwyn deigned no reply—the ironical bluntness of the question annoyed him.

"You have formed a very unjust opinion of me, Mr. Alwyn," continued Heliobas, "an opinion which neither honors your courtesy nor your intellect—pardon me for saying so. You ask me to 'mock' and 'delude' you as if it were my custom and delight to make dupes of my suffering fellow-creatures! You come to me as though I were a mesmerist or magnetizer such as you can hire for a few guineas in any civilized city in Europe—nay, I doubt not but that you consider me that kind of so-called 'spiritualist' whose enlightened intelligence and heaven-aspiring aims are demonstrated in the turning of tables and general furniture-gyration. I am, however, hopelessly deficient in such knowledge. I should make a most unsatisfactory conjurer! Moreover, whatever you may have heard concerning me in Paris, you must remember I am in Paris no longer. I am a monk, as you see, devoted to my vocation; I am completely severed from the world, and my duties and occupations in the present are widely different to those which employed me in the past. Then I gave what aid I could to those who honestly needed it and sought it without prejudice or personal distrust; but now my work among men is finished, and I practice my science, such as it is, on others no more, except in very rare and special cases."

Alwyn heard, and the lines of his face hardened into an expression of frigid hauteur.

"I suppose I am to understand by this that you will do nothing for me?" he said stiffly.

"Why, what CAN I do?" returned Heliobas, smiling a little. "All you want—so you say—is a brief forgetfulness of your troubles. Well, that is easily obtainable through certain narcotics, if you choose to employ them and take the risk of their injurious action on your bodily system. You can drug your brain and thereby fill it with drowsy suggestions of ideas—of course they would only he SUGGESTIONS, and very vague and indefinite ones too, still they might be pleasant enough to absorb and repress bitter memories for a time. As for me, my poor skill would scarcely avail you, as I could promise you neither self-oblivion nor visionary joy. I have a certain internal force, it is true—a spiritual force which when strongly exercised overpowers and subdues the material—and by exerting this I could, if I thought it well to do so, release your SOUL—that is, the Inner Intelligent Spirit which is the actual You—from its house of clay, and allow it an interval of freedom. But what its experience might be in that unfettered condition, whether glad or sorrowful, I am totally unable to predict."

Alwyn looked at him steadfastly.

"You believe in the Soul?" he asked.

"Most certainly!"

"As a separate Personality that continues to live on when the body perishes?"

"Assuredly."

"And you profess to be able to liberate it for a time from its mortal habitation—"

"I do not profess," interposed Heliobas quietly. "I CAN do so."

"But with the success of the experiment your power ceases?—you cannot foretell whether the unimprisoned creature will take its course to an inferno of suffering or a heaven of delight?—is this what you mean?"

Heliobas bent his head in grave assent.

Alwyn broke into a harsh laugh—"Come then!" he exclaimed with a reckless air,—"Begin your incantations at once! Send me hence, no matter where, so long as I am for a while escaped from this den of a world, this dungeon with one small window through which, with the death rattle in our throats, we stare vacantly at the blank unmeaning honor of the Universe! Prove to me that the Soul exists—ye gods! Prove it! and if mine can find its way straight to the mainspring of this revolving Creation, it shall cling to the accused wheels and stop them, that they may grind out the tortures of Life no more!"

He flung up his hand with a wild gesture: his countenance, darkly threatening and defiant, was yet beautiful with the evil beauty of a rebellious and fallen angel. His breath came and went quickly,—he seemed to challenge some invisible opponent. Heliobas meanwhile watched him much as a physician might watch in his patient the workings of a new disease, then he said in purposely cold and tranquil tones:

"A bold idea! singularly blasphemous, arrogant, and—fortunately for us all—impracticable! Allow me to remark that you are overexcited, Mr. Alwyn; you talk as madmen may, but as reasonable men should not. Come," and he smiled,—a smile that was both grave and sweet, "come and sit down—you are worn out with the force of your own desperate emotions—rest a few minutes and recover your self."

His voice thouqh gentle was distinctly authoritative, and Alwyn meeting the full gaze of his calm eyes felt bound to obey the implied command. He therefore sank listlessly into an easy chair near the table, pushing back the short, thick curls from his brow with a wearied movement; he was very pale,—an uneasy sense of shame was upon him, and he sighed,—a quick sigh of exhausted passion. Heliobas seated himself opposite and looked at him earnestly, he studied with sympathetic attention the lines of dejection and fatigue which marred the attractiveness of features otherwise frank, poetic, and noble. He had seen many such men. Men in their prime who had begun life full of high faith, hope, and lofty aspiration, yet whose fair ideals once bruised in the mortar of modern atheistical opinion had perished forever, while they themselves, like golden eagles suddenly and cruelly shot while flying in mid-air, had fallen helplessly, broken-winged among the dust-heaps of the world, never to rise and soar sunwards again. Thinking this, his accents were touched with a certain compassion when after a pause he said softly:

"Poor boy!—poor, puzzled, tired brain that would fain judge Infinity by merely finite perception! You were a far truer poet, Theos Alwyn, when as a world-foolish, heaven-inspired lad you believed in God, and therefore, in godlike gladness, found all things good!"

Alwyn looked up—his lips quivered.

"Poet—poet!" he murmured—"why taunt me with the name?" He started upright in his chair—"Let me tell you all," he said suddenly; "you may as well know what has made me the useless wreck I am; though perhaps I shall only weary you."

"Far from it," answered Heliobas gently. "Speak freely—but remember I do not compel your confidence."

"On the contrary, I think you do!" and again that faint, half-mournful smile shone for an instant in his deep, dark eyes, "though you may not be conscious of it. Anyhow I feel impelled to unburden my heart to you: I have kept silence so long! You know what it is in the world, … one must always keep silence, always shut in one's grief and force a smile, in company with the rest of the tormented, forced-smiling crowd. We can never be ourselves—our veritable selves—for, if we were, the air would resound with our ceaseless lamentations! It is HORRIBLE to think of all the pent-up sufferings of humanity—all the inconceivably hideous agonies that remain forever dumb and unrevealed! When I was young,—how long ago that seems! yes, though my actual years are taut thirty, I feel an alder-elde of accumulated centuries upon me—when I was young, the dream of my life was Poesy. Perhaps I inherited the fatal love of it from my mother—she was a Greek-and she had a subtle music in her that nothing could quell, not even my father's English coldness. She named me Theos, little guessing what a dreary sarcasm that name would prove! It was well, I think, that she died early."

"Well for her, but perhaps not so well for you," said Heliobas with a keen, kindly glance at him.

Alwyn sighed. "Nay, well, for us both,—for I should have chafed at her loving restraint, and she would unquestionably have been disappointed in me. My father was a conscientious, methodical business man, who spent all his days up to almost the last moment of his life in amassing money, though it never gave him any joy so far as I could see, and when at his death I became sole possessor of his hardly-earned fortune, I felt far more sorrow than satisfaction. I wished he had spent his gold on himself and left me poor, for it seemed to me I had need of nothing save the little I earned by my pen—I was content to live an anchorite and dine off a crust for the sake of the divine Muse I worshipped. Fate, however, willed it otherwise,—and though I scarcely cared for the wealth I inherited, it gave me at least one blessing—that of perfect independence. I was free to follow my own chosen vocation, and for a brief wondering while I deemed myself happy, … happy as Keats must have been when the fragment of 'Hyperion' broke from his frail life as thunder breaks from a summer-cloud. I was as a monarch swaying a sceptre that commanded both earth and heaven; a kingdom was mine-a kingdom of golden ether, peopled with shining shapes Protean,—alas! its gates are shut upon me now, and I shall enter it no more!"

"'No more' is a long time, my friend!" interposed Heliobas gently. "You are too despondent,—perchance too diffident, concerning your own ability."

"Ability!" and he laughed wearily. "I have none,—I am as weak and inapt as an untaught child—the music of my heart is silenced! Yet there is nothing I would not do to regain the ravishment of the past—when the sight of the sunset across the hills, or the moon's silver transfiguration of the sea filled me with deep and indescribable ecstasy—when the thought of Love, like a full chord struck from a magic harp, set my pulses throbbing with delirious delight—fancies thick as leaves in summer crowded my brain—Earth was a round charm hung on the breast of a smiling Divinity—men were gods—women were angels'—the world seemed but a wide scroll for the signatures of poets, and mine, I swore, should be clearly written!"

He paused, as though ashamed of his own fervor, and glanced at Heliobas, who, leaning a little forward in his chair was regaling him with friendly, attentive interest; then he continued more calmly:

"Enough! I think I had something in me then,—something that was new and wild and, though it may seem self praise to say so, full of that witching glamour we name Inspiration; but whatever that something was, call it genius, a trick of song, what you will,—it was soon crushed out of me. The world is fond of slaying its singing buds and devouring them for daily fare—one rough pressure of finger and thumb on the little melodious throats, and they are mute forever. So I found, when at last in mingled pride, hope, and fear I published my poems, seeking for them no other recompense save fair hearing and justice. They obtained neither—they were tossed carelessly by a few critics from hand to hand, jeered at for a while, and finally flung back to me as lies—lies all! The finely spun web of any fancy,—the delicate interwoven intricacies of thought,—these were torn to shreds with as little compunction as idle children feel when destroying for their own cruel sport the velvety wonder of a moth's wing, or the radiant rose and emerald pinions of a dragon-fly. I was a fool—so I was told with many a languid sneer and stale jest—to talk of hidden mysteries in the whisper of the wind and the dash of the waves—such sounds were but common cause and effect. The stars were merely conglomerated masses of heated vapor condensed by the work of ages into meteorites and from meteorites into worlds—and these went on rolling in their appointed orbits, for what reason nobody knew, but then nobody cared! And Love—the key-note of the theme to which I had set my mistaken life in tune—Love was only a graceful word used to politely define the low but very general sentiment of coarse animal attraction—in short, poetry such as mine was altogether absurd and out of date when confronted with the facts of every-day existence—facts which plainly taught us that man's chief business here below was simply to live, breed, and die—the life of a silk-worm or caterpillar on a slightly higher platform of ability; beyond this—nothing!"

"Nothing?" murmured Heliobas, in a tone of suggestive inquiry—"really nothing?"

"Nothing!" repeated Alwyn, with an air of resigned hopelessness; "for I learned that, according to the results arrived at by the most advanced thinkers of the day, there was no God, no Soul, no Hereafter—the loftiest efforts of the highest heaven—aspiring minds were doomed to end in non-fruition, failure, and annihilation. Among all the desperately hard truths that came rattling down upon me like a shower of stones, I think this was the crowning one that killed whatever genius I had. I use the word 'genius' foolishly—though, after all, genius itself is nothing to boast of, since it is only a morbid and unhealthy condition of the intellectual faculties, or at least was demonstrated to me as such by a scientific friend of my own who, seeing I was miserable, took great pains to make me more so if possible. He proved,—to his own satisfaction if not altogether to mine,—that the abnormal position of certain molecules in the brain produced an eccentricity or peculiar bias in one direction which, practically viewed, might be described as an intelligent form of monomania, but which most people chose to term 'genius,' and that from a purely scientific standpoint it was evident that the poets, painters, musicians, sculptors, and all the widely renowned 'great ones' of the earth should be classified as so many brains more or less affected by abnormal molecular formation, which strictly speaking amounted to brain-deformity. He assured me, that to the properly balanced, healthily organized brain of the human animal, genius was an impossibility—it was a malady as unnatural as rare. 'And it is singular, very singular,' he added with a complacent smile, 'that the world should owe all its finest art and literature merely to a few varieties of molecular disease!' I thought it singular enough, too,—however, I did not care to argue with him; I only felt that if the illness of genius had at any time affected ME, it was pretty well certain I should now suffer no more from its delicious pangs and honey-sweet fever. I was cured! The probing-knife of the world's cynicism had found its way to the musically throbbing centre of divine disquietude in my brain, and had there cut down the growth of fair imaginations for ever. I thrust aside the bright illusions that had once been my gladness; I forced myself to look with unflinching eyes at the wide waste of universal Nothingness revealed to me by the rigid positivists and iconoclasts of the century; but my heart died within me; my whole being froze as it were into an icy apathy,—I wrote no more; I doubt whether I shall ever write again. Of a truth, there is nothing to write about. All has been said. The days of the Troubadours are past,—one cannot string canticles of love for men and women whose ruling passion is the greed of gold. Yet I have sometimes thought life would be drearier even than it is, were the voices of poets altogether silent; and I wish—yes! I wish I had it in my power to brand my sign-manual on the brazen face of this coldly callous age-brand it deep in those letters of living lire called Fame!"

A look of baffled longing and un gratified ambition came into his musing eyes,-his strong, shapely white hand clenched nervously, as though it grasped some unseen yet perfectly tangible substance. Just then the storm without, which had partially lulled during the last few minutes, began its wrath anew: a glare of lightning blazed against the uncurtained window, and a heavy clap of thunder burst overhead with the sudden crash of an exploding bomb.

"You care for Fame?" asked Ileliobas abruptly, as soon as the terrific uproar had subsided into a distant, dull rumbling mingled with the pattering dash of hail.

"I care for it—yes!" replied Alwyn, and his voice was very low and dreamy. "For though the world is a graveyard, as I have said, full of unmarked tombs, still here and there we find graves, such as Shelley's or Byron's, whereon pale flowers, like sweet suggestions of ever-silenced music, break into continuous bloom. And shall I not win my own death-garland of asphodel?"

There was an indescribable, almost heart-rending pathos in his manner of uttering these last words—a hopelessness of effort and a despairing sense of failure which he himself seemed conscious of, for, meeting the fixed and earnest gaze of Ileliobas, he quickly relapsed into his usual tone of indolent indifference.

"You see," he said, with a forced smile, "my story is not very interesting! No hairbreadth escapes, no thrilling adventures, no love intrigues—nothing but mental misery, for which few people have any sympathy. A child with a cut finger gets more universal commiseration than a man with a tortured brain and breaking heart, yet there can be no quotion as to which is the most intense duel long enduring anguish of the two. However, such as my troubles are I have told you all I have laid bare my 'wound of living'—a wound that throbs and burns, and aches, more intolerably with every pissing hour and day—it is not unnatural, I think, that I should seek for a little cessation of suffering; a brief dreaming space in which to rest for a while, and escape from the deathful Truth—Truth, that like the flaming sword placed east of the fabled garden of Eden, turns ruthlessly every way, keeping us out of the forfeited paradise of imaginative aspiration, which made the men of old time great because they deemed themselves immortal. It was a glorious faith! that strong consciousness, that in the change and upheaval of whole universes the soul of man should forever over-ride disaster! But now that we know ourselves to be of no more importance, relatively speaking, than the animalculae in a drop of stagnant water, what great works can be done, what noble deeds accomplished, in the face of the declared and proved futility of everything? Still, if you can, as you say, liberate me from this fleshly prison, and give me new sensations and different experiences, why then let me depart with all possible speed, for I am certain I shall find in the storm-swept areas of space nothing worse than life as lived in this present world. Remember, I am quite incredulous as to your professed power—" he paused and glanced at the white-robed, priestly figure opposite, then added, lightly, "but I am curious to test it all the same. Are you ready to being your spells?—and shall I say the Nunc Dimittis?"