ToWalter H. Mudie
DMITRI passed his life in doing good. In that lay all his happiness. In the whole of Salonika there was no man or woman so vile, so incorrigibly steeped in iniquity, as to fail to stir his compassion. All men were his brothers: all men, he sometimes thought, were himself.
He preached in the streets and in the markets, and this is the gospel the young man brought to his hearers.
“All forms of consciousness are God. If the trees are conscious, then they are part of God. If lions are conscious, they also are God. The more alive a man is—the more conscious he is of himself and his environment—the more of God’s spirit does he possess. For God is a vast, infinite, potential Intelligence that is conscious of itself only through us—and, perhaps, through forms of life that are not human, and, maybe, through certain minerals and gases that appear to have some of the attributes of consciousness. Of these last things I do not speak with certainty. But sure it is that each man and woman has within him and her something of the Holy Spirit. God sees through our eyes and hears with our ears. Therefore, we are all God: we are all the same. Between the ‘wicked’ man and the ‘good’ man there is no shadow of difference. If one hates another, he is hating himself.”
His pleasant, eager smile, his vehement eyes, and his tall, athletic frame made many women desire him, but he went to bed with none, for all the grosser appetites of his body seemed to have been sublimated into an ecstatic spiritual passion that spent itself in a thousand deeds of compassionate love.
They thought him mad, but they never reviled or taunted him, for he was known throughout the entire breadth of that city as a man of noble deeds and imperishable kindness.
“Poor boy!” said Susannah, the Jewish woman who sold vegetables, “’tis a pity so fine a fellow should be wasted. Those lips of his were made for kissing.”
“You say what is right,” agreed Zacyntha, a lewd Greek woman. “A night of love with him would but whet one’s appetite.”
Strange it was that none of those women of the half-world ever attempted to tamper with him, but vileness must always recognize and fear what is pure. They gazed at him often with eyes of longing, it is true, but the gaze he gave in return was always the very negation of sex.
“A fool! A Parsifal!” commented the respectable ladies, for most of them would most gladly have lost their respectability had Dmitri been willing to snatch it from them.
Now, in a dark street of that city it was that Dmitri dwelt, inhabiting two rooms in the house of Jacques Laborde, a young Frenchman who taught many languages. Jacques and his wife, Madelein, loved him for his goodness, but a time came when they were afraid on his account.
“You have noticed something, eh?” asked Madelein one night, as she and her husband sat alone.
“Abouthim?...Yes, yes. How can one express it? It is just as though he had begun to lose himself, as though he had spent so much of himself that there was little left to spend—less every day.”
“Yes—that’s it. Yet his appetite is good, he is as strong as ever, and he has never been more cheerful.”
“Do you ever feel,” asked Jacques, after a pause, “do you ever feel when he is talking to you, that he is giving you something of himself—merging his personality into yours?”
“Thatisthe feeling. I don’t like it. Just as though his soul was escaping from his body into mine.... Sometimes, Jacques, I’ve felt as though something of his personality—something ghostly, ghastly, too—had floated from him to me. It’s made a change in me. It’s coloured me faintly, like a few drops of red wine in a glass of water. Is such a thing possible?”
“I don’t know,” answered her husband, uneasily. “Tell me: has the change in you been for evil or for good?”
She pondered a minute.
“Neither one nor the other, I think,” she answered. “The change has made me more vivid: it has sharpened me—put an edge on my feelings. Perhaps, really, it has made me more myself.”
“Why have you not spoken of this before?”
She laughed, nervously.
“Because it was uncanny, and I was uncertain. I’m not certain even now. One gets fanciful in my condition. Mamma has warned me to expect strange thoughts.”
Jacques clenched and unclenched his fists.
“It’s only fancy—of course it’s only fancy.”
“Yet thereisa change in Dmitri!” urged Madelein.
“Yes. But if Dmitri changes, we don’t.”
He put an end to the conversation by going into the kitchen to draw beer.
But when, later that evening, Dmitri entered the house and looked into their room for a chat before going to bed, they were immediately startled by his appearance and manner.
“Is all well with you?” asked the young Greek, standing in the doorway.
“Yes, indeed,” answered Jacques. “And you?”
“I am so happy,” answered Dmitri, “that I could almost shout with it. I am getting to the heart of the Great Secret at last. I am beginning to prove from my own experience that what I have always preached is true.”
His large, magnetic eyes dropped their gaze first upon Jacques and then upon Madelein: upon her eyes his gaze floated, and then sank into them. He was not looking at her eyes, nor yet beyond them: he was penetrating within them. The woman did not flinch, but greedily drank his gaze.
“What are you doing?” she asked, in a whisper.
“Do you not feel,” he asked, slowly, “that you are not now what you were a minute ago?”
“Dmitri! Dmitri!” exclaimed Jacques; “you must not do that.”
But the Greek did not move his gaze from the woman’s face.
“We are all one,” he said; “there is no real separation between any of us: it is merely these houses of flesh that keep us divided. When our bodies die, all our souls will merge into one Soul.”
Jacques rose timidly, and put his hand on Dmitri’s arm.
“You must not do that!” he said, gently.
And because Dmitri still gazed into Madelein’s eyes and she into his, Jacques placed himself between them and broke the spell.
“Sit down, Dmitri,” said Jacques.
Dmitri’s face had the look of a man whose soul is being disintegrated. He had lost his personality. His eyes were dull, his face was lifeless. His body, his movements, his attitude still suggested abundant strength: simply, his spirit had suffered eclipse.
“I want to give myself to my fellows,” he muttered, “but no one will take me. I am the rejected of all men. My soul is sent back to its home each time it tries to escape.”
He sat down heavily, and brooded.
There, a little later, they left him, for his mood of gladness had been transformed into one of gloom, and though next morning, as he dressed, Dmitri sang out of a deep heart filled to the brim with joy, Jacques looked significantly and sorrowfully at his wife. She, in turn, questioned him with her eyes. But neither spoke.
A week passed.
There came a day when Dmitri, feeling that almost any time now his soul might leave his body never to return, decided to stay indoors and give a final revision to the little book he had written.
His bedroom window looked upon a narrow street. Across the way was a wine-shop, and even at this early hour a few men were sitting drinking at the little tables placed on the pavement. For a few minutes Dmitri stood gazing lovingly and compassionately at the passers-by; then, abruptly, and with a sudden sigh, he turned away, and sat down at a small table upon which he had placed the MS. of his book.
He read steadily from the beginning. Half-way through he came upon this passage.
The soul clings to its body; the spirit yearns for its companion-flesh. Is it true that only death can separate them?It is impossible for us to love others more than we love ourselves, if our souls cling to us in this despairing way. Loving is giving: loving is surrender of one’s self: one’s self is one’s soul.... But my soul refuses to be surrendered. It will not leave me. Even when, because of my love for others, I try to banish it from my body, it will not go, or, if it does go, it soon returns. Is it refused, I wonder, by those to whom I give it?Often I feel people wanting me; often I feel them asking for me. The magnetic ones draw me.
The soul clings to its body; the spirit yearns for its companion-flesh. Is it true that only death can separate them?
It is impossible for us to love others more than we love ourselves, if our souls cling to us in this despairing way. Loving is giving: loving is surrender of one’s self: one’s self is one’s soul.... But my soul refuses to be surrendered. It will not leave me. Even when, because of my love for others, I try to banish it from my body, it will not go, or, if it does go, it soon returns. Is it refused, I wonder, by those to whom I give it?
Often I feel people wanting me; often I feel them asking for me. The magnetic ones draw me.
He sat and pondered. He recalled how, throughout the whole of his life, he had with joy spent himself upon others. A passion for giving had always been his. As a boy, he frequently had felt an aching desire to give himself to the sea—to swim out into the depths and, spreading out his arms, swoon away into nothingness, making himself a part of that water. Sometimes, even, he had wanted to give himself to fire, to walk naked into a white, inviting furnace. And, always, when on the edge of a cliff, he felt the great pull of space—a quick eagerness to disappear, to dissipate himself into nothingness.... To give himself—no matter to what, if only it were greater than he—was the passion that haunted him continually. Not to cease his existence; not to cast the universe from him; not to repudiate the life that had been given him. But to live more fiercely in flame, more largely and grandly as a part of a great giant ocean, more freely as an atom in illimitable space.
Best of all, to give himself to humanity: not to live in one body, but in a million bodies....
As he sat, a thought came to him—a thought that thrust into and pierced him, as a sword thrusts and pierces, that shook him to the very foundations of his being.
“If one man cannot draw from me my soul, a great crowd of men may—nay, must,” he told himself; “I know that even one man or woman can take from me and absorb for a brief period something of my spirit; surely, when a thousand men and women are pulling at me like a thousand magnets, my spirit will go entirely out of me and live in them for ever.”
The argument seemed so logical and so obvious, that he wondered at himself for not thinking of it before.
He abandoned the reading of his MS., and began to pace the room. His excitement almost frenzied him, and his thoughts ran wildly.
“I must dress for the occasion. A purple robe. And a message. I shall give it out that I have a message. At the north of the Citadel it shall be, and as I talk to them I shall face the east.”
He visualized the waiting crowd so vividly that his body acted as though the occasion had already arrived. He stopped walking and threw out his arms. His eyes became dilated. His lips moved. And then from his moving lips a torrent of speaking poured. He held his hearers. Even the little children in his brain were awed: he saw them huddling against their mothers.... With a shudder he came to himself.
There were many newspaper offices to visit. One of them, in return for a column advertisement, agreed to publish an “interview” with him. He advertised his meeting outside the Citadel in every newspaper, however obscure, for he felt he had no further use for his savings. “When my soul leaves me altogether,” he whispered, to himself, “my body will die.” He bought a scarlet robe in the Bazaar.
Jacques and Madelein watched him anxiously during the following days. Several times he spoke to them of his “ending,” and told them it was near at hand. He put his small affairs carefully in order, and handed what remained of his savings to Jacques.
“I will keep it for you,” said Jacques.
“No: it is yours. In a day or two I shall have no further use for money. Only the husk of me will remain.”
Jacques looked at him very sternly.
“Have I been a good friend to you, Dmitri?” he asked.
“Why, yes. Always. You and Madelein have always been my best friends.”
“Well, then, tell me what you are going to do. Why do you hand me your money? Why do you speak of only the husk of you remaining? What is the meaning of your advertisements in the newspapers?”
Dmitri smiled.
“Do not be anxious about me, Jacques,” he entreated; “no harm will come to me—only a great good. The most wonderful thing that can happen to anybody is about to happen to me.”
And Jacques’ further persuasion had no power to make Dmitri speak.
As Dmitri, clad in his purple robe, walked through the streets of Salonika on the evening appointed for his meeting outside the Citadel, he was followed by a large crowd of friendly people; indeed, he walked in the midst of the crowd, talking as he went. He bore himself regally, and his face shone with joy.
He had only a mere handful of disciples, but there were very many, both rich and poor, who liked him, and there were still more who were driven by curiosity to that high ground outside the city walls, which looks towards the jagged mountains above Hortiach.
Having arrived at the place he had selected for the delivery of his Message, his disciples went among the assembled people, directing them where to sit. Men and women, to the number of nearly a thousand, seated themselves in a semicircle on the higher slopes of the hill; on the hill’s summit stood Dmitri, looking down upon the faces lit by the sun in its setting.
Bareheaded, he stood and raised both arms for silence. The eager speech of his beholders died suddenly. Dmitri stood for a long minute without a word: then, just when the silence was becoming uncomfortable, he spoke in his golden voice.
“Many of you have come here from curiosity; a few have come because of their love. But I have the same message for everyone. All the great teachers of the world have loved their fellows: no man can teach or be taught without love. Because I desire to teach you something now, I ask any of you who hate me, or secretly jeer at me, or despise me, to kill that hate and that mockery and that contempt. Indeed, no man among you can hate me without also hating himself. For we are all one. We are not a thousand different souls, but one soul. There is only one soul in all the wide world, but each of your bodies contains a part of that soul: the great, brooding spirit of the Universe is split up into millions of parts. Of those millions of parts I possess but one. It is the dearest thing I have: it is theonlything I have. My body is nothing—just dust. It is the same with you all: your bodies are merely the prisons of your souls.
“Many of you will not understand me now, but I ask you, when I am gone from among you, to consider my words. You will all, however, understand this: no man gives unless he loves. If I want to give you something, it is because I love you. Idowant to give you something. I want to give you myself: my soul. It is yours. Take it.”
He paused. The blank faces of the men and women hurt him. They thought him mad. He could see that many of the people were whispering to each other. Some were even smiling.
“Listen!” he shouted, passionately. “I want to give you myself so that I may prove to you that we are all one—that our souls are one soul. If my soul can depart from my body into your bodies, then you will know that we are, in truth, all one, and that to hate or hurt your neighbour is to hurt and hate yourselves, and that to injure yourselves by wickedness is to injure all the souls in all the world.
“I ask all who love me, and who have understood the words I have spoken, to make themselves ready to receive me.”
With excitement and passion, he attempted to confuse his mind and reduce it to chaos by inviting a multitude of varied thoughts. He stiffened his muscles and opened his eyes to their widest. He willed his soul to depart. Madness painted his face a ghastly white, his features became convulsed, the veins in his forehead stood out horribly....
And now the onlookers stared in fascination. A few murmured with fear and disgust.
For a minute and more Dmitri stood in silence, goading himself on to unrestrainable madness. His mind broke. He began to paw the air with his hands. And then, smiling stupidly, he sat down and played with his fingers.
His disciples rushed upon him.
“The miracle has come to pass!” exclaimed one.
“Poor Dmitri!” said a man who was not a disciple; “he gets worse and worse! His madness is incurable.”
Hundreds of men and woman crowded round him, but Jacques was one of the first to reach his side. With the help of others, he led Dmitri from the crowd and took him home.
A month passed.
Dmitri came downstairs to the room in which Jacques and Madelein were sitting. His face had no meaning. His eyes were empty.
He sat down at the table, and tears began to run down his cheeks.
Jacques stared at him for some little time in profound distress.
“We must get rid of him,” he said, aloud, to Madelein, “if only for your sake.”
“Yes,” answered his wife, sorrowfully; “I can bear him no longer. He must go.”
ToAdrian L. Burns
WHEN my friend Trevor Hempel disappeared from among all his friends, he left me the following letter:
I am off to Australia to-morrow, and I’m going without saying farewell to any one. It is a choice between my committing murder and leaving Europe for ever. Nature has played me false—has tricked me. Between my wife and me she has placed something monstrous: a “sport” so hideous that to live any longer as a husband would mean a swift corrosion of anything good that is left of me.
I felt, my dear old friend, that I must speak out my mind to some one. It is a selfish feeling. I want to rid myself of the obsession of this wickedness. I want you to share its knowledge with me. The thing is of such a kind that it ought not to have happened. Nature ought not to lie in wait for us and spring out like a baboon from behind a tree. We know Nature is cruel, but not until lately did I know she could be malignant, damnably malignant, looking years ahead, calculating craftily all the time....
It is nine years since I met the woman who afterwards became my wife. I was in Salonika on one of my quarterly business visits. At the house of Madame Leconte de Stran it was that I met Judith for the first time. Her husband was with her: a dark evil man, short, with a great head and depth of chest and long, deformed arms. She was as spiritual as he was gross: very quiet, but full of character, and with a mind both strong and active.
I remembergoing up to Madame de Stran.
“Who is that woman standing against the piano?” I asked.
“Mrs. Sterling. Don’t you know her?”
At the word “Mrs.” I felt that quick annoyance that sometimes comes to one when one hears for the first time that a woman one admires is married.
“No. Is her husband here?”
She indicated the shambling figure I have described to you.
“That!” I exclaimed. “That evil-looking beast her husband? Impossible!”
Madame de Stran gave me a quick, inquisitive look.
“Professor Sterling,” she said, “is perhaps the most distinguished man of science in Salonika. Why do you call him a beast?”
“Did I? I’m sorry. Tell me more about him.”
“Well, he describes himself as an experimental psychologist. He experiments in hypnotism, vivisects brains, and.... Last year he published in Rome a book that is talked about rather secretly.”
She stopped for a moment, and then laughed.
“All this sounds rather horrible,” she added, “but I suppose it isn’t really. At all events, he is greatly respected here by all men of learning.”
“If an opportunity arises,” I said, “will you introduce me to her? What I mean is, I don’t want the introduction to be conspicuous.”
She nodded and smiled.
“You’ll find her very charming,” she said, as I walked away.
And later on Madame presented me to Judith.
From the very first moment we talked without restraint. But then, as I learned afterwards, she was never restrained with anybody. She was utterly frank and natural; interesting, too; full of curiosity about life.
What appealed to me most in her, I think, was her careful choice of words when discussing any subject that really mattered. Her speech was free from all exaggeration; she never invented opinions on the spur of the moment as so many people do in casual conversation. This pleased and attracted me. But there was something in her that repelled—that kept me at a distance. All the time we talked, I felt that the best part of her—the most exquisite part—was on the other side of the room with her husband. She was not really with me: she was with him. I resented this. I had no right to resent it; but I did. For, already, I was in love with her.
Lovers move craftily. So I sought out her husband and was presented to him. He looked me over carefully.
“You have been talking to my wife,” he observed.
“Yes,” said I. “We have been talking to each other.”
His rather large mouth smiled insincerely.
I felt he had guessed my secret. Certainly, his personality emanated a faint hostility. He turned to Luigi Papash, ... the man who has since become famous as a poet, and began to talkto him. I was dismissed....
You would be bored if I were to describe to you my feverish lover’s restlessness during the next three weeks. I did many foolish things—neglected my business, wandered about alone, and sought every opportunity to be within sight and sound of Judith. I had only to shut my eyes to seehereyes, calm and grey, her pale oval face, her dark hair. She seemed pitiful. My jealousy burned me. It was impossible for me to see her and her husband together without a horrid excitement.... But you know these things: all men feel the same about them.
I learned very little more about her. The previous year, I was told, she had had a child, a baby-boy, who had died when eight months old. She had been married three years. Her husband kept his work hidden from her. He never discussed it, never referred to it. But of their mutual idolatry there was no shadow of doubt. No two people were more essential each to the other; yet (or do I mean because?) they were entirely different.
At the end of three weeks I went back to Athens.
Madame de Stran knew my secret; oh, I suppose every one knew it. Every one except Judith who, absorbed in her husband, never exercised her intuitions with regard to myself. Madame wrote to me occasionally; she was very kind. Just news of Salonika people. And somewhere in each letter would be a sentence: “The Sterlings are still here”; or, “Professor Sterling has just published a pamphlet on ‘The Nature and Origin of Cancer': I am sending you a copy”; or, “When I told Mrs. Sterling I was writing to you, she wished me to send you her remembrances.”
Then, one morning, opening a letter of Madame de Stran’s before I touched any of my other correspondence, I read: “Professor Sterling is seriously ill. They say he has brain fever.”
He would die: Iknewit. I prayed that he should. I willed it. I thought of nothing else all day. That detestable, dark man must die. Judith must be released....
“Released”? What arrogant vanity distorts the vision of all lovers! Released? Why, she was happy. Her husband’s brain was not for her a prison: it was the wide world. His enfolding arms were freedom....
That same evening I took the steamer from Le Pirée to Salonika....
I want to describe that night to you, because it was the happiest in my life. You must remember that for a long time I had been suffering under a strain so cruel that my nerves and brain were bruised and quivering. The sea—the stars—space! They brought me solace.
I remember leaning over the rail and looking down at the sea; it was saturated with stars and moonlight. It seemed to me that I became part of what I looked at. Does that convey anything to you? I was released from myself. I had got rid of myself. I had become renewed.... It isimpossible, my dear friend, for me to describe what change took place in me for that one night. It was a sudden cessation of pain, a freeing of the soul, an accession of power. Illusion, no doubt—I mean the consciousness of power. If I had been Zeus himself——!
At all events, no sleep came to me that night: I wanted neither sleep nor rest. I was not going to Judith, for Judith already was with me. She was with me more closely that night than she ever was, though I married her. My mind was full of poets’ phrases: “His silver skin laced with his golden blood”: lines from “Annabel Lee”: the “magic casements” of Keats: some stupendous things from Whitman. These did not tease or worry me: they were like the potent delicate fumes of a drug. All life was poetry: there was no possible interpretation of life except the romantic interpretation. Happiness lay not in gathering and garnering beauty, but in surrendering oneself to beauty. And, in a burst, Wagner’s “Tristan” rushed flood-like upon me; I was drowned in its pleasure-pain——
Well, he died. He was dead when I arrived at Salonika. The news gave me no pleasure, for what had happened I had known would happen.
Madame de Stran received me.
“You look ill,” she said; “or perhaps you are tired?”
I made her sit down and tell me all she knew about Judith.
“I wish to God she had never borne him a child!” I said, when she told me she had seen a photograph of the baby taken just before the illness from which it died.
“He was very like his father: dark, misshapen, vulpine,” said Madame.
“Don’t speak of him. The father and the child are dead: only she remains. Has she any close friends in Salonika?”
“No—not one that is very close, though many people like her. She did not make intimacies. You see, her husband absorbed her.”
“And now what will happen?”
Madame told me that she had already written to Judith offering her help: probably a reply to her letter would come in the morning. She promised to summon me if I could be of the slightest use, and with this small comfort I returned to my hotel to brood. Inaction lay so heavily upon me that it was scarcely to be endured. I wanted to help—tobesomething to her.
That night I lay awake in dark dejection. In those days I was not used to suffering, to anxiety. At length I slept....
Day after day I stayed on, hoping to be summoned, Madame de Stran giving me all the comfort she could. He was buried. Judith shut herself up in her house! At night I would walk from my hotel towards Kalamaria and, in the complete darkness, wander in the garden surrounding her home. I remember that I used to touch the flowers with my fingers. I used to put my foot on the pathway and say to myself: “Herfoot has been there!” The garden was magical with remembrances of her. Yet she was absent, and the ache in me grew and grew. My eyes used to become hot with unshed tears. Though it was torture to linger there, yet I could never draw myself away until very late, and one night, sitting down on a bank, I fell asleep. As I woke, the scent of dew-laden roses weakened me unmercifully; and I sobbed without tears....
I must tell you all this: it matters: it is the heart of the tragedy that has happened to me: that, and the remembrance of her brute-husband who so wickedly, so monstrously, still lives in my son....
One night, while in her garden, I saw her. I was standing in a little grove of pepper-trees. She came slowly towards me. I stepped back to conceal myself. Her little feet on the grass made no sound. What were her thoughts? Oh, of him—him whom she had loved and was still loving. It was he who for her haunted this garden, not I. If my body had been multiplied a hundred-fold and all my hundred bodies were hiding there in the trees, she would have felt nothing. She passed and repassed, and then disappeared into the gloom of the house.
At length, under the implacable pressure of my own self-torture, I wrote to her. I told her I knew of her grief, that.... In short, I asked to be allowed to come and see her.
Months later, she told me that my letter had terrified her. Some phrases in it had called up many dead memories and, pondering, she had seen in a flash that I loved her. Her spirit was too sore even for sympathy, and offering her love was like offering her an unsheathed sword. My letter brought no answer, and two days later Madame de Stran told me mournfully that Judith had left Salonika for Constantinople....
Four months passed; to me, working in Athens, they were four years. I did not deceive myself by telling myself I would try to forget her: no man ever tries to forget the woman he loves. Madame de Stran wrote occasionally, promising, and repeating her promise in each letter, that she would tell me as soon as she received news of Judith’s return. My business prospered: you know, I have always been successful. I threw myself into my work, and exhausted my false, feverish energy by violent exercise. I rode my horse an hour each day: I swam: I walked: and, occasionally, I sought the baleful comfort of drink.
September came and went. Then in October I was visited by a mood of such unremitting desperateness that I suddenly stopped my work and my violent exercise. I felt incapable of any action, for I had exhausted all my energy. I had used up my capacity for suffering; I could feel neither pain nor pleasure. For days I sat stupidly in my office, staring at nothing. I closed my door to all visitors; I transacted no business; I answered no letters.
Then, one morning, as I was moodily pacing up and down my private room, a clerk entered with a telegram. Idly I tore open the envelope and read its contents. It was from Madame—just one word, “Come.” But that word meant everything: it changed the whole world for me....
Two days later I was in Salonika. I did not wait even to call on Madame de Stran, but went straight to Judith’s house.
It was early afternoon. I was admitted. The room into which I was shown was empty. Already greatly agitated, I felt my excitement increasing almost beyond bounds whilst I waited. What should I say when she entered? Would she still be thrall to her dead husband? Would his personality still envelop hers and obscure it?
She entered so silently that, though my eyes were fixed on the door, I scarcely realized she was there. A swift searching of her face told me she was well.
She was courteous, she was kind; but she was timid. She spoke of her friends in Constantinople.
“I have been very busy with my work,” she said, smiling.
As she looked at me it seemed to me that she was doing everything possible to be gentle with me; it was as though she knew she had the power to hurt me, and was afraid that some chance word might wound.
“Work?” I asked.
“Yes. My husband left his last book half finished—a great mass of notes, and a rough synopsis of each chapter. I wrote the book as he wished it to be written. He helped me all the time.”
“Hehelpedyou!” I exclaimed, shocked.
“Yes. You do not believe in communication with the dead? He did not speak to me, it is true, but he guided me.”
I felt suddenly sick and cold.
“You must not believe it!” I exclaimed. “It is impossible! Such things do not happen! You may think it happened, but it didn’t!”
She smiled gently, as she said:
“Ah! But Iknow!”
“But, dear Mrs. Sterling ... why, such a thing has never come to pass in the whole history of the world. Why, then, should it happen to you?”
She shook her head.
“Do not let us discuss it,” she said. “Besides, the book is finished.”
“And does he still communicate with you—guideyou?”
“No,” she answered sadly; “all that is finished—he has gone from me—gone, I am convinced, for ever.”
“I also have been working,” I said, “working hard.”
“You look tired. Have you been in Salonika long?”
Our talk drifted to commonplace things, and soon I rose to leave.
Next day I sought her again. She was in the garden, for, though it was now late October, the weather was very warm and sunny. She seemed disturbed, but not surprised, when she saw me. We wandered slowly under the trees; their leaves left the branches as we came and fell upon our way. I did not feel that she was unhappy. I asked if I might come to see her every afternoon.
“Why, yes,” she said, “if it pleases you.”
So every afternoon I spent an hour with her, and, when the cold weather came with the Varda winds, we sat indoors.
By Christmas she had promised to marry me....
Now, my dear friend, you must understand that even before our marriage I realized that she was not, nor ever could be, wholly mine. In some inexplicable way, she still belonged tohim. Many women are like that: the best women are. Sterling’s name was never mentioned; after our engagement he was not referred to even remotely. Yet she was his. Then why, you ask, did she marry me? Out of pity; I am sure of it. Yet, in a way, she loved me and loves me still. No one could have been more tender, more generous, more self-sacrificing: it weakens and unmans me to think of these things....
I took her away with me to Athens. I was very happy. I had never believed such unalloyed bliss as mine was possible. It never faded. And Judith, in her fashion, was happy also.
Sometimes, it is true, Sterling passed ghost-like between us. There were occasions when ... but let me give you an instance.
One day, in the April after our marriage, we went to Eleusis by rail and wandered over the ruins of that once-wonderful place. Tired, we sat down to rest on a broken column. We were silent and alone. There came upon me one of those moods of gentle ecstasy in which the soul seems to nestle softly in one’s body, satisfied and glad to be there. Judith’s hand was in mine: I felt she was reallywithme, in body, in mind, in soul. My ecstasy increased. Lifting my eyes to her face, I saw that she also was a-thrill with bliss. Her eyes were softened with unshed tears. Her throat trembled visibly. Her breath came quickly.... But, Christ! not for me! Not for this moment, nor this place! But forhim! For some day of long ago—for some never-forgotten hour of love with him....
Gently, very gently, though I suffered as never before, I withdrew my hand from hers. She trembled violently, turned her face to mine and, with a little cry, flung her arms about me.
“Oh, little one!” she cried; “forgive me! Forgive me!”
And the tears that had gathered for him were shed for me....
And now I have to tell you of the slow horror that began to creep upon me—upon us both. For a long time, I thrust it away with my hands, I closed my eyes to it, my mind refused to admit it. Only to-day, indeed, for the first time, do I really accept and believe it, though for years it has hung about my neck most loathsomely.
A year after our marriage Judith bore me a male child—a healthy baby who came into the world without unnecessary fuss and who continued to thrive from the moment of his birth. Though, of course, I was very fond of the little chap, I did not see much of him. Indeed, as you know, I am not the kind of parent who gloats over his offspring.
We employed a nurse, and both baby and nurse lived in the rooms set apart for them. When I returned home from my work each evening, our baby was generally asleep, and I rarely saw him on these occasions. If I did go to his cot, Judith always accompanied me; indeed, I used to tease her on account of her appearing never to wish me to be alone with our child.
Two months after his birth I went alone to London on business, expecting to be away a month or so. But I was detained in England much longer than I had expected, and when at length I returned to Athens I had been away four months....
When, my dear fellow, I began this letter, I meant to tell you all my tragedy in detail, but now, when I reach the very heart of it, I feel I must hurry its telling.
I saw my son—a little black creature—and it seemed to me he looked at me with eyes of hate. He was not mine: I could not feel that he was mine. His nurse, looking from him to me, said kindly:
“He is very like you, sir—he has your forehead.”
“Yes,” breathed Judith, who stood by my side; “we have often said that, haven’t we, nurse?”
I turned to look at her, but she fluttered away to the other end of the room, and I could not see her face. So, with an effort, I bent low over the cot in which my son lay and scrutinized each feature of his face in turn. But I could see none of my blood in him. Nothing of mine was his.... The dead past had come to life. Sterling still survived....
I am sure that my manner of living at this time puzzled and distressed my friends—you, in particular. If you will carry your mind back to two years ago, you will recollect how I plunged myself into wild dissipation for a time, and how in a fit of most reticent yet hot anger I left wife and home for Persia, then India, then China. All the time I was away—until, indeed, yesterday when I returned home after my long absence—I was trying to forget. To forget my son, I mean. For a time I hated Judith. It was through her that Nature had dealt me this blow. If she had not so dearly loved Sterling, I thought, this thing could not have happened to me. But as the months went by I softened to my wife; my hatred of her broadened into a hatred of life itself.
In the letters she wrote me she never made even passing mention of our son.
Then, yesterday, I returned. Judith was expecting me. Her manner, generally so calm, was disturbed, agitated. She has grown very thin, very old.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Upstairs—in the nursery. But do not go to see him now,” she urged. “Stay with me a little while.”
And she put her arms about my neck and kissed me fondly. My flesh responded to hers. But whilst we stood locked in each other’s arms, my memory, hating me, threw up before my eyes a vivid picture of the dark little creature I left behind two years ago. I shuddered. My braced arms slackened. I turned away.
“I must see him now,” I said; “is he well?”
“Yes,” she answered—regretfully, I thought.
We went to the nursery. He was sitting on the floor, playing with his toys. She stood between him and me, as though shielding him. It was Sterling—Sterling as he must have looked at the age of two and a half—an eager, intelligent face, long, deformed arms, a great breadth of chest, a vulpine look in his eyes....
As his eyes caught mine, his whole body stiffened. He put up a little hand against his face and made a sound of rage.
I do not know what movement I made, but Judith, suddenly stooping, caught her child up from the floor and folded him in her arms.
“You must not touch him!” she said, pale and distraught.
And she placed a hungry kiss upon his lips....
And so, my dear friend, farewell.
ToBertram Pace
MARRIAGE seemed to Katya a much jollier game than she had anticipated. She liked her house, her garden, her servants; as for Guy, he was too utterly adorable for words. Most of all, she liked patronizing those of her friends and acquaintances who were less fortunate than herself: she enjoyed giving them little dinners during which she would speak a few barbed, malicious words that made her listeners wince.
One afternoon, sitting among her roses in the silent garden, she began to think of Captain Pierre Lacroix, her Brussels lover, in whose arms she had nestled so often the previous year. He had really been quite perfect, and since she had returned home to Greece she had frequently, when lying awake at night, reproached herself for not having yielded to his wild solicitations. Never in the years that remained to her was she likely to meet so fine an animal, so fierce a lover, so fascinating a personality.
Her husband, Guy Fallon, was adorable, but he was not Pierre Lacroix. God had made only one Pierre. And he was thousands of miles away in Brussels. Still, she could write to him; if she could not throw herself into love’s furnace, she could at least play with love’s fire....
So she left her roses and went into her cool house with its tiled floors, it great entrance-hall where a white fountain so cleverly made a mist of water, its great walls on to which hung, like butterflies, so many Segantinis, and its wide passages that somehow made her feel like a princess of Ancient Rome.
Her boudoir, however, was rather small. Its furniture was of inlaid rosewood. There were many full-length mirrors sunk deeply into frames of unusual shape, and the stove was made of porcelain, painted green. Sitting down near the open window, she began to write.