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Richard F. Burton - "Supplemental Nights, Volume 5"

Unknown - "The Bible, King James version, Book 17: Esther"

George Meredith - "The Tragic Comedians, v2"

Rudyard Kipling - "Barrack Room Ballads"

In the Wilderness

R >> Robert Hichens >> In the Wilderness




"No."

"Dion, why don't you tell me what happened that day at Burstal?"

"I scarcely could."

"I wish you would try."

"Well--I think it was a mistake for you to begin your public career in
oratorio by singing 'Woe unto them.'"

"Why?"

"It's an unsympathetic thing. It's a cruel sort of thing."

"Cruel? But it's one of the best-known things in oratorio."

"You made it quite new."

"How?"

"It sounded fanatical when you sang it. I never heard it sound like that
before."

"Fanatical?" she said, and her voice was rather cold.

"Rosamund," he said, quickly and anxiously, "you asked me to tell you
exactly what I meant, what I felt, that is----"

"Yes, I know. Go on, Dion. Well? It sounded fanatical----"

"To me. I'm only telling you my impression. When I've heard 'Woe unto
them' before it has always sounded sad, piteous if you like, a sort of
wailing. When you sang it, somehow it was like a curse, a tremendous
summoning of vengeance."

"Why not? Are not the words 'Destruction shall fall upon them'?"

"I know. But you made it sound--to me, I mean--almost as if you were
rejoicing personally at the thought of the destruction, as if you were
longing almost eagerly for it to overwhelm the faithless."

"I see. That is what you meant by fanatical?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

After a long pause she said:

"Nobody has told me that till now."

"Perhaps others didn't feel it as I did."

"I don't know. What does one know about other people? Not even my
guardian said anything. I never could understand----"

She broke off, then continued steadily:

"So you think I repelled people that day?"

"It seems impossible that you--"

But she interrupted him.

"No, Dion, it isn't at all impossible. I think if we are absolutely
sincere we repel people very often."

"But you are the most sincere person I have ever seen, and you must know
how beloved you are, how popular you are wherever you go."

"When I'm being sincere with the part of me that's feeling kind or
affectionate. Let us go to the Parthenon."

She got up, opened her white sun-umbrella and turned round, keeping her
hat in her left hand. As she stood there in that setting of marble, with
the sun caught in her hair, and the mighty view below and beyond her,
she looked wonderfully beautiful, Dion thought, but almost stern. He
feared perhaps he had hurt her. But was it his fault? She had told him
to speak.

Rosamund did not return to the subject of her debut at Burstal, but
in the late afternoon of that day she spoke of her singing, and of the
place it might have in their married life. Dion believed she did this
because of their conversation near the Temple of Nike.

They had spent most of the day on the Acropolis. Both had brought books:
she, Mahaffy's "History of Greek Literature"; he, a volume of poems
written by a young diplomat who loved Greece and knew her well. Neither
of them had read many pages, but as the strong radiance began to soften
about them on the height, and the breeze from the Saronic Gulf came to
them with a more feathery warmth and freshness over the smiling bareness
of the Attic Plain, Dion, who had been half-dreamily turning the leaves
of his little book, said:

"Rosamund."

"Yes?"

"Look at the sea and the mountains of Trigania, those far-off
mountains"--he pointed--"and the outpost of Hydra."

She looked and said nothing. Then he read to her these lines of the
young diplomat-poet:

"A crescent sail upon the sea,
So calm and fair and ripple free
You wonder storms can ever be;

A shore with deep indented bays,
And o'er the gleaming water-ways
A glimpse of Islands in the haze;

A face bronzed dark to red and gold,
With mountain eyes that seem to hold
The freshness of the world of old;

A shepherd's crook, a coat of fleece,
A grazing flock;--the sense of peace,
The long sweet silence,--this is Greece!"

Rosamund gazed before her at Greece in the evening light.

"'The freshness of the world of old,'" she repeated, and her voice had
a thrill in it. "'The sense of peace, the long sweet silence,--this is
Greece.' If there was music with the music of those words I should love
to sing them."

"And how you could sing them. Like no other."

"At any rate my heart would be in them. 'The freshness of the world of
old--the sense of peace, the long sweet silence.'"

She was standing now near the edge of the sacred rock, looking out over
the tawny plain flanked by gray Hymettos, and away to the sea. There
were no voices rising from below. There was no sound of traffic on
the white road which wound away down the slope to the hidden city. Her
contralto voice lingered on the words; her lips drew them out softly,
lengthening the sounds they loved.

"Freshness, that which belonged to the early world, long sweet silence,
peace. Oh, Dion, if you know how something in me cares for freshness and
for peace!"

Her glad energies were strangely stilled; yet there was a kind of force
in her stillness, the force that is in all deep truths of whatever
nature they may be. He felt that he was near to perhaps the most
essential part of her, to that which was perhaps more truly her than
even the radiant and buoyant humanity by means of which she drew people
to her.

"Could you live always out of the world?" he asked her.

"But it wouldn't be out of the world."

"Away from people--with me?"

"With you?"

She looked at him for a moment almost as if startled. Then there came
into her brown eyes a scrutiny that seemed half-inward, as if it were
partially applied to herself.

"It's difficult to be certain what one could do. I suppose one has
several sides."

"Ah! And your singing side?"

"I want to speak about that."

Her voice was suddenly more practical, and her whole look and manner
changed, losing in romance and strangeness, gaining in directness and
energy.

"We've never discussed it."

She sat down on a slab of rock at the edge of the precipice, and went
on:

"You don't mind your wife being a public singer, do you, Dion?"

"Suppose I do?"

"Do you?"

"You're so energetic I doubt if you could be happy in idleness."

"I couldn't in England."

"And in Greece? But we are only here for such a short time."

He took her hand in his.

"Learning the lessons of happiness."

"Good lessons for us!" she said, smiling.

"The best there are. I believe in the education of joy. It opens the
heart, calls up all the generous things. But your singing; can I bear
your traveling about perpetually all over England?"

"If I get engagements."

"You will. You had a good many for concerts last winter. You've got
several for June and July. You'll get many more. But who's to go with
you on your travels?"

"Beattie, of course. Why do you look at me like that?"

"How do we know Beatrice won't marry?"

Rosamund looked grave.

"Why shouldn't she?" asked Dion.

"She may, of course."

"D'you think she'll remain your apanage now?" he asked, with a hint of
smiling sarcasm that could not hurt her.

"My apanage?"

"Hasn't she been something like that?"

"Perhaps she has. But Beattie always sinks herself in others. She
wouldn't be happy if she didn't do that. Of course, your friend Guy
Daventry's in love with Beattie."

"Deeply."

"But I'm not at all sure that Beattie--"

She paused abruptly. After a moment she continued:

"You asked me to-day why I married you. I didn't answer you and I'm not
going to answer you now--entirely. But you're not like other men, most
other men."

"In what way?"

"A way that means very much to me," she answered, with a delicious
purity and directness. "Women feel such things very soon when they know
men. I could easily have never married, but I could never, never have
married a man who had lived, as I believe most men have lived."

"I think I always knew that from the first moment I saw you."

"Did you? I'm glad. I care tremendously for _that_ in you, Dion--more
than you will ever know."

"That's my great, too great reward," he said soberly, almost with a
touch of deep awe. Then, reddening and looking away, he added, "You were
the very first."

"Was I?"

"Yes, but--but you mustn't think that it was a religious feeling,
anything of that kind, which kept me back from--from certain things. It
was more the desire to be strong, healthy, to have the sane mind in the
sane body, I think. I was mad about athletics, all that sort of thing.
Anyhow, you know now. You were the first. You will be the only one in my
life."

There was a long silence between them. Then Rosamund said, with a change
of manner to practical briskness:

"If Beattie ever should marry, I could take a maid about with me."

"Yes. An hotel in Liverpool with a maid! In Blackpool, in Huddersfield,
in Wolverhampton, in Glasgow, when there's a heavy thaw on, with a maid!
Oh, how delightful it will be! Manchester on a wet day in early spring
with a--"

"Hush!" she put one hand on his lips gently, and looked at him with a
sort of smiling challenge in her eyes. "Do you mean to forbid me?"

"I don't think I could ever forbid you to do anything."

"We shall see in England."

"But, Rosamund"--there was no one in sight, and he slipped one arm round
her--"if something came to fill your life, both our lives, to the brim?"

"Ah, then,"--a very remote expression came into her eyes,--"then it
would all be different."

"All?"

"Yes. Everything would be quite different then."

"Not our relation to each other?"

"Yes, even that. Perhaps that most of all."

"I--I hardly like to hear you say that," he said, struggling against
a perhaps stupid, or even hateful, feeling of depression mingled with
something else.

"But wouldn't it? Think!"

"I don't want that to change. I should hate any change in that."

"What we want, and what we hate, doesn't affect what has to be. And I
expect at the end we shall be thankful for that. But, Dion, yes, _if_
what you say, I could give it all up. Public singing! What would it
matter then? I'm a woman, not a singer. But perhaps it will never come."

"Who knows?" he said.

And he sighed.

She turned towards him, leaned one hand on the stone and looked at him
almost anxiously.

"What is the matter, Dion?"

"Why? There is nothing the matter."

"Would you rather we never had that in our lives?"

"A child?"

"Yes, a child."

"I thought I longed for that," he answered.

"Do you meant that you have changed and don't long any more?"

"I suppose it's like this. When a man's very happy, perfectly happy, he
doesn't--perhaps he can't--want any change to come. If you're perfectly
happy instinctively you almost fear any change. Till to-day, till this
very minute perhaps, I thought I wanted to have a child--some day.
Perhaps I still do really, or perhaps I shall. But--you must forgive me,
I can't help it!--this evening, sitting here, I don't want anything to
come between us. It seems to me that even a child of ours would take
some of you away from me. Don't you see that?"

She shook her head.

"That's a man's feeling. I can't share it."

"But think--all the attention you would have to give to a child, all the
thoughts you would fasten on it, all the anxieties you'd have about it!"

"Well?"

"One only has a certain amount of time. You'd have to take away a good
deal, a great deal, of the time you can now give to me. Oh, it sounds
too beastly, I know! Perhaps I scarcely mean it! But surely you can see
how a man who loves a woman very much might, without being the least
bit unnatural, think, 'I'd like to keep every bit of her for myself.
I'd like to have her all to myself!' I dare say this feeling will pass.
Remember, Rose, we're only just married, and we're in Greece, right away
from every one. Don't think me morbidly jealous, or a beast. I'm not. I
expect lots of men have felt as I do, perhaps even till the first child
came."

"Ah, then it would be all right," she said. "The natural things, the
things nature intends, are always all right."

"How blessedly sane and central you are!"

"If we had a child--Dion, you must believe me!--we should be drawn ever
so much nearer together by it. If we ever do have one, we shall look
back on this time--you will--and think 'We were much farther apart then
than we are now.'"

"I don't like to hear you say that," he said gravely, almost with pain.

Could a woman like Rosamund be driven by an instinct blindly? She
was such a perfect type of womanhood. It would be almost a tragedy if
she--such a woman--died childless. Perhaps instinct had obscurely warned
her of that, had taught her where to look for a mate. He, Dion, had
always lived purely. That day she had acknowledged that she had divined
it. Was that, perhaps, her real, her instinctive reason for marrying
him? But a man wants to be married for one thing only, because the
woman longs for him. And Dion was just an ordinary man with very strong
feelings.

"Let's take one more stroll before we go down," he said.

"Yes, to the maidens," she answered.

Her voice sounded relieved. She pushed her arm gently through his as
they moved away, and he felt all his body thrill. The mystery of love
was almost painful to him at that moment. He realized that a great love
might grow to have an affinity with a disease. "I must be careful. I
must take great care with this love of mine," he thought.

They went slowly over the slabs of marble and the gray rocks and passed
before the west front of the Parthenon. Dion felt slight resistance in
Rosamund's arm, and stopped. In the changing light the marble was full
of warm color, was in places mysterious and translucent almost as amber.
The immense power, the gigantic calm of the temple, a sort of still
breathing of Eternity upon Time, confronted a glory which was beginning
to change in the face of its changelessness. Soon the seas that held
their dream under the precipices of Sunion, and along the shores of
Aegina, where the tall shepherd boys in their fleeces of white lead home
the flocks in the twilight, would lose the wonder of their shining, and
the skies the rapture of their diffused light. In the quietly austere
Attic Plain, through the whispering groves of Academe, and along the
sacred way to Eleusis, a very delicate vagueness was beginning to
travel, like a wanderer setting forth to greet the coming of the night.
The ranges of hills and mountains, Hymettos and Pentelicus, Parnes
stretching to the far distance, Mount Corydallus, the peak of Salamis,
the exquisitely long mountains of Trigania--"the greyhounds of their
tribe," Rosamund loved to call them--were changing almost from moment
to moment, becoming a little softer, a little more tender, putting off
their distinct hues of the day for the colors of sleep and forgetting.
But the great Doric columns fronting them, the core of the heart of this
evening splendor, seemed not to defy, but to ignore, all the processes
of change. In its ruin the Parthenon seemed to say, "I have not
changed." And it was true. For the same soul which had confronted
Pericles confronted the two lovers who now stood at the foot of the
temple.

"I wonder how many thousands of people of all nations have learnt the
same lesson here," Rosamund said at last.

"The Doric lesson, you mean?"

"Yes, of strength, simplicity, endurance, calmness."

"And I wonder how many thousands have forgotten the lesson."

"Why do you say that, Dion?"

"I don't know. Great art is a moral teacher, I'm sure of that. But men
are very light-minded as a rule, I think. If they lived before these
columns they might learn a great deal, they might even develop in a
splendid direction, I believe. But an hour, even a few hours, is that
enough? Impressions fade very quickly in most people."

"Not in you. You never forget the Parthenon, and I shall never forget
it."

She stood for some minutes quite still gazing steadily up at the
temple, gaining--it seemed to her--her own stillness from its tremendous
immobility.

"The greatest strength is in silence," she thought. "The greatest power
is in motionlessness."

She thought of the raging of the great sea. But no! There was more of
the essence of strength, of the stern inwardness of power, in that which
confronted life and Time in absolute stillness; in a mountain, in
this temple. And the temple spoke to something far down within her; to
something which desired long silences and deep retirement, to something
mystic which she did not understand. The temple was Pagan and she knew
that. But that in her to which it spoke was not Pagan. Before she left
Athens she meant to realize that the soul of man, when it speaks through
mighty and pure effort, of whatever kind, always speaks to the same
Listener, to but one, though man may not know it.

"Doric!" she said at last. "I have always known that for me that would
be the greatest. The simplest thing is the most sublime thing. That
temple is like the Sermon on the Mount to me. Didn't you bring me here
because it meant so much to you?"

"Not entirely. No, Rosamund, I think I brought you here because I felt
that you belonged here."

"This satisfies me."

She sighed deeply, still gazing at the temple.

"You aren't only in Greece, you are of Greece. Come to the maidens."

As they went on slowly the acid voices of the little birds which fly
perpetually among the columns of the Parthenon followed them, bidding
them good night.

They descended over the uneven ground and came to the famous Porch of
the Caryatides, jutting out from the little Ionic temple which is the
handmaid of the Parthenon. Not far from the Porch, and immediately
before it, was a wooden bench. Already Rosamund and Dion had spent many
hours here, sometimes sitting on the bench, more often resting on the
warm ground in the sunshine, among the fragments of ruin and the speary,
silver-green grasses. Now Rosamund sat down and Dion stood by her side.

"Rosamund, those maidens are my ideal of womanhood shown in marble," he
said.

"They are almost miraculously beautiful. And one scarcely knows why. But
I know that every time I see them the mystery of their beauty seems more
ineffable to me, and the meaning of it seems more profound. How did men
get so much meaning into marble?"

"By caring so much for what is beautiful in womanhood, I suppose."

He sat down close beside her.

"I sometimes wonder whether women have any idea what some men, many men,
I believe, seek in women."

"What do they seek?"

"What do those maidens that hold up the Porch suggest to you?"

"All that's calm without a touch of coldness, and strong without a touch
of hardness, and noble without a touch of pride, and obedient without a
touch of servility."

"Brave sweetness, too, and protectiveness. They are wonderful, and so
are some women. When I saw you in the omnibus at Milan I thought of
these maidens immediately."

"How strange!"

"Why strange?"

"Isn't it?" she said, gazing at the six maidens in their flowering
draperies of marble, who, upon their uncovered heads, bore tranquillity
up the marble architrave. "How wonderfully simple and unpretending they
are!"

"Are not you?"

"I don't know. I don't believe I think about it."

"I do. Rosamund, sometimes I feel that I am an unique man--just think of
a fellow in a firm on the Stock Exchange being unique!--because I have
had an ideal, and I have attainted to it. When I was here alone, I
conceived for the first time an ideal of woman. I said to myself, 'In
the days of ancient Greece there must have been such women in the flesh
as these maidens in marble. If I could have lived and loved then!' And I
came away from Greece carrying a sort of romantic dream with me. And now
I sit here with you; I can't think why I, a quite ordinary man, should
be picked out for perfect happiness."

"Is it really perfect?" she asked, turning to him.

"I think so. In such a place with you!"

As the evening drew on, a little wind came and went over the rocky
height, but it had no breath of cold in it. Two Greek soldiers passed
by slowly behind them--short young men with skins almost as dark as
the skins of Arabs of the South, black eyes and faces full of active
mentality. They were talking eagerly, but stopped for a moment to look
at the English, and beyond them at the six maidens on their platform of
marble. Then they went on talking again, but presently hesitated, came
back, and stood not far off, gazing at the Porch with a mixture of
reverence and quiet wistfulness. Dion drew Rosamund's attention to them.

"They feel the beauty," he said.

"Yes, I like that."

She looked at the two young men with a smile. One of them noticed it,
and smiled back at her almost boyishly, and with a sort of confidential
simplicity.

The light began to fail. The six maidens were less clearly seen, but the
deep meaning of them did not lessen. In the gathering darkness they and
their sweet effort became more touching, more lovable. Their persistence
was exquisite now that they confronted with serenity the night.

"They are beautiful by day, but at night they are adorable," said
Rosamund.

"Don't you know why I thought of them when I met you?" he whispered.

She got up slowly. The Greek soldiers moved, turned, and went down the
slope towards the Propylae. Their quick voices were heard again. Then
there was the sound of a bell.

"Time to go," said Rosamund.

As they followed the soldiers she again put her arm through her young
husband's.

"Dion," she said, "I think I'm a little afraid of your ideals. I
understand them. I have ideals too. But I think perhaps mine are less in
danger of ever being shattered than yours are."

"Why? But I know mine are not in danger."

"How can you say that?"

"It's no use trying to frighten me. But what about your ideals? What is
the nature of the difference between yours and mine, which makes yours
so much less vulnerable than mine?"

But she only said:

"I don't believe I could explain it. But I feel it, and I shall go on
feeling it."

They went down the steep marble steps, gave the guardian at the foot of
them good night, and walked almost in silence to Athens.



CHAPTER IV

After that day Rosamund and Dion often talked of the child who might
eventually come into their lives to change them. Rosamund indeed, now
that such a possibility had been discussed between them, returned to it
with an eagerness which she did not seek to conceal. She was wonderfully
frank, and her frankness seemed to belong naturally to her transparent
purity, to be an essential part of it. Dion's momentary depression that
evening on the Acropolis had evidently stirred something in her which
would not let her rest until it had expressed itself. She had detected
for the first time in her husband a hint of something connected with his
love for her which seemed to her morbid. She could not forget it and she
was resolved to destroy it if possible. When they next stood together on
their beloved height she said to him:

"Dion, don't you hate anything morbid?"

"Yes, loathe it!" he answered, with hearty conviction. "But surely you
know that. Why d'you ask me such a thing? How dare you?"

And he turned to her his brown face, bright this morning with good
spirits, his dark eyes sparkling with hopefulness and energy.

It was a pale morning, such as often comes to Athens even at the edge
of the summer. They were standing on the little terrace near to the
Acropolis Museum, looking down over the city and to helmet-shaped
Lycabettos. The wind, too fond of the Attic Plain, was blowing, not
wildly, but with sufficient force to send the dust whirling in light
clouds over the pale houses and the little Byzantine churches. Long
and narrow rivulets of dust marked the positions of the few roads
which stretched out along the plain. The darkness of the groves which
sheltered the course of the Kephisos contrasted strongly with the flying
pallors and seemed at enmity with them. The sky was milky white and
gray, broken up in places by clouds of fantastic shapes, along the
ruffled edges of which ran thin gleams of sunshine like things half
timorous and ashamed. Upon the flat shores near Phaleron the purple
seas broke in spray, and the salty drops were caught up by the wind and
mingled with the hurrying grains of dust. It was not exactly a sad day,
but there was an uneasiness abroad. The delicate calm of Greece was
disturbed. Nevertheless Dion was feeling gay and light-hearted, inclined
to enjoy everything the world about him offered to him. Even the
restlessness beneath and around them accorded with his springing
spirits. The whirling spirals of dust suggested to him the gaiety of a
dance. The voice of the wind was a joyous music in his ears.

"How dare you?" he repeated with a happy pretense of indignation.

"Because I think you were almost morbid yesterday."

"I? When?"

"When we spoke of the possibility of our some day having a child."

"I had a moment of thinking that too," he agreed. "Yes, Rose, the
thought went through my mind that a great love, such as mine for you,
might become almost a disease if one didn't watch it, hold it in."

"If it ever did become like that, do you know what would happen?"

"What, Rose?"