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Eleanor H. Porter - "Dawn"

Samuel Pepys - "Diary of Samuel Pepys, June 1667"

George Gissing - "Demos"

Unknown - "The Bible, King James version, Book 64: 3 John"

In the Wilderness

R >> Robert Hichens >> In the Wilderness




"Instead of rejoicing in it I should shrink from it."

"That's enough for me!"

He spoke gaily, confidently.

"Besides, I don't really believe I'm a man to love like that. I
only imagined I might for a moment, perhaps because it was twilight.
Imaginings come with the twilight."

"I could never bear to think, if a child came, that you didn't want it,
that you wished it out of the way."

"I never should. But I expect lots of young married people have queer
thoughts and feelings which they keep entirely to themselves--I blurted
mine out. You've got a dangerously sincere husband, Rose. The whole
matter lies in your own hands. If we ever have a child, love it, but
don't love it more than me."

"I should love it so differently! How could maternal love interfere with
the love of woman for man?"

"No, I don't suppose it could."

"Of course it never could."

"Then that's settled. Where shall we go to get out of the wind? It seems
to be rising."

After searching for a place of shelter in vain they eventually took
refuge in the Parthenon, under the shadow of the great western wall.
Perhaps in consequence of the wind the Acropolis was entirely deserted.
Only the guardians were hidden somewhere, behind columns, in the Porch
of the Museum, under the roof of their little dwelling at the foot of
the marble staircase which leads up to the Propylae. The huge wall of
the Parthenon kept off the wind from the sea, and as Rosamund and Dion
no longer saw the whirling dust clouds in the plain they had, for the
moment, almost an illusion of peace. They sat down on the guardian's
bench, just beneath some faint fragments of paintings which dated
from the time when the temple was made use of as a church by Greek
Christians; and immediately Rosamund went on talking about the child.
She spoke very quietly and earnestly, with the greatest simplicity, and
by degrees Dion came to see her as a mother, to feel that perhaps only
as a mother could she fulfil herself. The whole of her beauty would
never be revealed unless she were seen with a child of her own. Hitherto
he had thought of her chiefly in relation to himself, as the girl he
longed to win, then as the girl he most wonderfully had succeeded in
winning. She put herself before him now in a different light, and he
saw in her new and beautiful possibilities. While she was talking his
imagination began to play about the child, and presently he realized
that he was thinking of it as a boy. Then, in a moment, he realized that
on the previous evening he had thought of a male, not of a female child.
With this in his mind he said abruptly:

"What sort of a child do you wish to have, Rosamund?"

"What sort?" she said, looking at him with surprise in her brown eyes.

"Yes."

"What do you mean? A beautiful, strong, healthy child, of course, the
sort of child every married woman longs to have, and imagines having
till it comes."

"Beautiful, strong, healthy!" he repeated, returning her look. "Of
course it could only be that--your child. But I meant, do you want it to
be a boy or a girl?"

"Oh!"

She paused, and looked away from him and down at the uncemented marble
blocks which form the pavement of the Parthenon.

"Well?" he said, as she kept silence.

"If it were to be a girl I should love it."

"You wish it to be a girl?"

"I didn't say that. The fact is, Dion"--and now she again looked at him,
"I have always thought of our child as a boy. That's why your question
almost startled me. I have never even once thought of having a girl. I
don't know why."

"I think I do."

"Why then?"

"The thought was born of the desire. You wanted our child to be a son
and so you thought of it as a son."

"Perhaps that was it."

"Wasn't it?"

He spoke with a certain pressure. She remained silent for a moment, and
two little vertical lines appeared in her forehead. Then she said:

"Yes, I believe it was. And you?"

"I confess that when yesterday we spoke of a child I was thinking all
the time about a boy."

She gazed at him with something visionary in her eyes, which made them
look for a moment like the eyes of a woman whom he had not seen till
now. Then she said quietly:

"It will be a boy, I think. Indeed, if it weren't perhaps absurd, I
should say that I know it will be a boy."

He said nothing more just then, but at that moment he felt as if he,
too, knew, not merely hoped, or guessed, something about their joint
future, knew in the depths of him that a boy-child would some day be
sent to Rosamund and to him, to influence and to change their lives.

The wind began to fail almost suddenly, the sky grew brighter, a shaft
of sun lay on the marble at their feet.

"It's going to be fine," Dion said. "Let's be active for once. The wind
has made me restless. Suppose we get a couple of horses and ride out to
the convent of Daphni!"

She got up at once.

"Yes. I've brought my habit, and haven't had it on once."

As they left the Great Temple she looked up at the mighty columns and
said;

"Doric! If we have a boy let us bring him up to be Doric."

"Yes, Rosamund," he said quietly and strongly. "We will."

Afterward he believed that it was then, and only then, that he caught
something of her deep longing to have a child. He began to see how a
man's child might influence him and affect his life, might even send him
upwards by innocently looking up to him. It would be bad, very bad, to
fail as a husband, but, by Jove! it would be one of the great tragedies
to fail as a father. Mentally Dion measured the respective heights
of himself and a very small boy; saw the boy's trusting eyes looking,
almost peering, up at him. Such eyes could change, could become very
attentive. "It wouldn't do to be adversely criticized by your boy," he
thought. And one day he said to Rosamund, but in almost a casual way:

"If we ever do have a boy, Rose, and want him to be Doric, we shall have
to start in by being Doric ourselves, eh?"

"Yes," she answered, "I've thought that, too."

"D'you think I could ever learn to be that?"

"I know you could. You are on the way already, I think. I noticed
in London that you were never influenced by all the affectations and
absurdities, or worse, that seem to have taken hold of so many people
lately."

"There has been a wave of something rather beastly passing over London
certainly. But I almost wonder you knew it."

"Why?"

"Can your eyes see anything that isn't good?"

"Yes. But I don't want ever to look long on what I hate."

"You aren't afraid you might cease from hating it!"

"Oh, no. But I believe in feeding always on wholesome food."

"Modern London doesn't."

"I shall never be modern, I'm afraid," she said, half laughing, and with
a soft touch of apparently genuine deprecation.

"Be eternal, that's better!" he almost whispered. "Listen to that
nightingale. It's singing a song of all the ages. You have a message
like that for me."

They had strolled out after dinner in the warm May night, and had walked
a little way up the steep flank of Lycabettos till they reached a wooden
bench near which were a few small fir trees. Somewhere among these trees
there was hidden a nightingale, which sang with intensity to Athens
spread out below, a small maze of mellow lights and of many not
inharmonious voices. Even in the night, and at a distance, they felt the
smiling intimacy of the little city they loved. Its history was like
a living thing dwelling among the shadows, hallowed and hallowing, its
treasures, like night flowers, breathed out a mysterious message to
them. They received it, and felt that they understood it. Had the
nightingale been singing to any city its song must have seemed to them
beautiful. But it was singing to Athens, and that fact gave to its
voice, in their ears, a magical meaning.

They sat for a while in silence. Nobody passed on the winding path.
Their impulse to solitude was unshared by the dwellers in Athens.
Neither knew exactly what thoughts were passing through the other's
mind, what aspirations were flaming up in the heart of the other. But
they knew that they were close bound in sympathy just then, voyaging
towards a common future. That future lay over the sea in gray England.
Their time in Greece was but an interlude. But in it they were
gathering up impressions, were laying in stores for their journey. The
nightingale's song was part of their provision. It had to sing to just
them for some hidden reason. And to Dion it seemed that the nightingale
knew the reason while they did not, that it comprehended all the under
things of love and of sorrow of which they were ignorant. When he spoke
again he said:

"A bird's song always makes me feel very unlearned. Do you know what I
mean?"

"Yes. We've got to learn so much."

"Together."

"Yes--partly."

"Partly?" he said quickly.

"I think there's a great deal that can only be learnt quite alone."

Again, as sometimes before, Dion trod on the verges of mystery, felt as
if something in Rosamund chided him, and was chilled for a moment.

"I dare say you are right," he said. "But I believe I could learn any
lesson more easily with you to help me."

"No, I don't think so."

"Perhaps we shall know which is right, you or I, when we've been much
longer together," he said, with an effort to speak lightly.

"Yes."

"Rosamund, sometimes you make me feel as if you thought I didn't know
you, I mean didn't know you thoroughly."

"Do I?"

"Yes."

Again silence fell between them. As Dion listened once more to the
persistent nightingale he felt that there was pain somewhere at the back
of its ecstasy. He looked down at the soft lights of little Athens, and
suddenly knew that much sorrow lay in the shadows of all the cities of
the earth. There was surely a great reserve in the girl who had given
herself to him. That was natural, perhaps. But to-night he felt that she
was aware of this reserve and was consciously guarding it like a sacred
thing. Presently they got up and went slowly down the hill.

"Suppose you had never married," he said, as they drew near to the city,
"how would you have lived, do you think?"

"Perhaps for my singing, at first," she answered.

"And afterwards?"

"Afterwards? Very quietly, I think."

"You won't tell me."

"I don't know for certain, and what does it matter? I have married. If I
hadn't, perhaps I should have been very selfish and thought myself very
self-sacrificing."

"I wonder in what way selfish."

"There are so many ways. I heard a sermon once on a foggy night in
London."

"Ah--that evening I called on you."

"I didn't say so. It made me understand egoism better than I had
understood it before. Perhaps it's the unpardonable sin."

"Then it could never be your sin."

"Hush!"

They no longer heard the nightingale. The voices and the houses of
Athens were about them.

As the days slipped by, Dion felt that Rosamund and he grew closer
together. He knew, though he could not perhaps have said how, that he
would be the only man in her intimate life. Even if he died she would
never--he felt sure of this--yield herself to another man. The tie
between them was to her a bond for eternity. Her body would never be
given twice. That he knew. But sometimes he asked himself whether her
whole soul would ever be given even once. The insatiable greed of a
great and exclusive love was alive within him, needing always something
more than it had. At first, after their marriage, he had not been aware
of this greed, had not realized that nothing great is content to
remain just as it is at a given moment. His love had to progress, and
gradually, in Greece, he became conscious of this fact.

His inner certainty, quite unshakable, that Rosamund would never belong
to another man in the physical sense made jealousy of an ordinary kind
impossible to him. The lowness, the hideous vulgarity of the jealousy
which tortures the writhing flesh would never be his. Yet he wanted more
than he had sometimes, stretched out arms to something which did not
come to nestle against him.

There was a great independence in Rosamund, he thought, which set
her apart from other women, Not only could she bear to be alone, she
sometimes wished to be alone. Dion, on the contrary, never wished to be
away from her. It might be necessary for him to leave her. He was not
a young doting fool who could not detach himself even for a moment from
his wife's apron strings. But he knew very well that at all times he
preferred to be with her, close to her, that he relished everything
more when he was in her company than when he was alone. She added to his
power of enjoyment, to his faculty of appreciation, by being beside
him. The Parthenon even was made more sublime to him by her. That was
a mystery. And the mystery of her human power to increase penetrated
everywhere through their life in common, like a percolating flood that
could not be gainsaid. She manifested her influence upon him subtly
through the maidens of the Porch, through the almost neat perfection
of the Theseion, through the detached grandeur of those columns in the
waste place, that golden and carved Olympieion which acts as an outpost
to Athens. It was as if she had the power to put something of herself
into everything that he cared for so that he might care for it more,
whether it were a golden sunset on the sea over which they drifted in
a sailing-boat off the coast of old Phaleron, or a marble figure in a
museum. She dwelt in the stones of a ruined temple; she set her feet
upon the dream of the distant mountains; she was in the dawn, the
twilight, and in all the ways of the moon, because he loved her and
found her in all things when they were together.

He did not know whether she, in a similar mysterious way, found him in
all that she enjoyed. He did not ask her the question. Perhaps, really,
in that truth of apprehension which lives very far down in a man, he had
divined the answer, although he told himself that he did not know.

He found always something new to enjoy and to worship in Rosamund.

They had many tastes in common. At first, of deliberate choice, they had
bounded their honeymoon with the precipices of the Acropolis, learning
the Doric lesson on that height above the world. Then one day they had
made a great sacrifice and gone to pass their hours in the pine woods
of Kephissia. They had returned to the Acropolis quite athirst. But by
degrees the instinct to wander a little farther afield took greater hold
upon them, their love of physical exercise asserted itself. They began
to take long rides on horseback, carrying food in their saddle-bags. The
gently wild charm of Greece laid its spell upon them. They both loved
Athens, but now they began to love, too, escaping from Athens.

Directly they were out of the city they were in a freedom that appealed
to the gipsy in both. Dion's strong boyishness, which had never yet
been cast off, was met and countered by the best of good fellowship
in Rosamund. Though she could be very serious, and even what he called
"strange," she was never depressed or sad. Her good spirits were
unfailing and infectious. She reveled in a "jaunt" or a "day out," and
her physical strength kept fatigue far from her. She could ride for many
hours without losing her freshness and zest. Every little episode of the
wayside interested and entertained her. Everything comic made her laugh.
She showed an ardor almost like an intelligent child's in getting to
understand all she saw. Scenery, buildings, animal life, people, every
offering of Greece was eagerly accepted, examined and discussed by her.
She was the perfect comrade for the wilds. Their common joy in the wilds
drew her and Dion more closely together. Never before had Rosamund been
quite away from civilization, from the hitherto easily borne trammels of
modern complicated life. She "found herself" in the adventure. The pure
remoteness of Greece came to her like natal air. She breathed it in with
a sort of rapture. It was as Dion had said. She was not merely in, she
was of, Greece.

They rode one day to Eleusis; on another day to Tatoi, buried in
oak-woods on the slope of Parnes; on another through noisy and mongrel
Piraeus, and over undulating wrinkled ground, burnt up by the sun and
covered with low scrub and bushes of myrtle, to the shore of the gulf
opposite to Salamis; on yet another to Marathon, where they lunched on
the famous mound beneath which the bodies of the Athenians who fell in
the battle were buried. They took no companion with them. Dion carried
a revolver in his hip pocket, but never had reason to show or to use
it. When they dismounted they tethered the horses to a bush or tree, or
sometimes hobbled their forelegs, and turned them loose for a while.

Such days were pure joy to them both. In them they went back to the
early world. They did not make the hard and self-conscious imaginative
effort of the prig to hurl themselves into an historic past. They just
let the land and its memories take them. As, sitting on the warm ground
among the wild myrtle bushes, they looked across the emerald green
unruffled waters to Salamis, that very long isle with its calm gray and
orange hills and its indented shores, perhaps for a moment they talked
of the Queen of Halicarnassus, and of the deception of Xerxes watching
from his throne on Mount Aegaleos. But the waters were now so solitary,
the peace about them was so profound, that the memory of battles soon
faded away in the sunshine. Terror and death had been here once. A queen
had destroyed her own people in that jeweled sea, a king had fled from
those delicate mountains. But now sea and land were for lovers. A fly
with shining wings journeyed among the leaves of the myrtles, a beetle
crept over the hot sandy ground leaving a minute pattern behind it;
and Rosamund and Dion forgot all about Artemisia, as they brooded,
wide-eyed, over the activities of the dwellers in the waste. At such
moments they realized the magic of life, as they had never realized it
in the turmoil of London. The insect with its wings that caught the
sun, the intent and preoccupied little traveler whose course could be
deflected by a twig, revealed the wonder that is lost and forgotten in
the crowded highways of men.

It was when they were at Marathon that Rosamund told Dion she loved
Greece partly because of its emptiness. The country was not only rather
bare of vegetation, despite its groves of glorious old olives, its woods
of oaks round Tatoi, its delicious curly forests of yellow-green pines,
which looked, Rosamund declared, as if they had just had their dainty
heads perfectly dressed by an accomplished coiffeur, it was also almost
strangely bare of men.

"Where are the Greeks?" Rosamund had often asked during their first few
rides, as they cantered on and on, scarcely ever meeting a human being.

"In the towns to be sure!" Dion had answered.

"And where are the towns?"

"Ah! That's more than I can tell you!" he had said, laughing.

To one hitherto accustomed to England, the emptiness of the country,
even quite near to Athens, was at first surprising. Soon it became
enchanting.

"This is a country I can thoroughly trust," Rosamund declared at
Marathon.

Dion had just finished hobbling the two horses, and now lifted himself
up. His brown face was flushed from bending. His thin riding-clothes
were white with dust, which he beat off with hands that looked almost as
if they wore gloves, so deeply were they dyed by the sun. As the cloud
dispersed he emerged carrying their lunch in a straw pannier.

"Why trust--specially?" he said. "Ah," he threw himself down by her
side with a sigh of happiness, "this is good! The historic mound, and
we think of it merely as a resting-place, vandals that we are. But--why
trust?"

"I mean that Greece never keeps any unpleasant surprises up her sleeve,
surprises such as other countries have of noisy, intruding people. It's
terrible how accustomed I'm getting to having everything all to myself,
and how I simply love it."

He began slowly unpacking the pannier, and laying its contents out on
the mound.

"You're a puzzle, Rosamund," he said.

"Why?"

"You have a greater faculty for making yourself delightful to all sorts
of people than I have found in any other person, woman or man. And yet
you are developing a perfect passion for solitude."

"Do you want people here?"

"No."

"Then you agree with me."

"But you have an absolute lust for an empty world."

"Look!"

She stretched out her right arm--she was leaning on the other with her
cheek in her hand--and pointed to the crescent-shaped plain which
lay beyond them, bounded by a sea which was a wonder of sparkling and
intense blue, and guarded by a curving line of low hills. There were
some clouds in the sky, but the winds were at rest, and the clouds were
just white things dreaming. In the plain there were no trees. Here and
there some vague crops hinted at the languid labors of men. No human
beings were visible, but in the distance, not very far from the sea
edge, a few oxen were feeding. Their dark slow-moving bodies intersected
the blue. There were no ships or boats upon the stretch of sea which
Rosamund and Dion gazed at. Behind them the bare hills showed no sign of
life. The solitude was profound but not startling. It seemed in place,
necessary and beautiful. In the emptiness there was something touching,
something reticently satisfying. It was a land and seascape delicately
purged.

"Greece and solitude," said Rosamund. "I shall always connect them
together. I shall always love each for the other's sake."

In the silence which followed the words the far-off lowing of oxen came
to them over the flats. Rosamund shut her eyes, Dion half shut his, and
the empty world was a shining dream.

When they had lunched, Rosamund said:

"I am going to climb up into that house. The owner will never come, I'm
sure."

Near them upon the mound was a dwelling of Arcady, in which surely a
shepherd sometimes lay and piped to the sun and the sea god. It was
lifted upon a tripod of poles, and was deftly made of brushwood, with
roof, floor and two walls all complete. A ladder of wood, from which the
bark had been stripped, led up to it.

"You want to sleep?" Dion asked.

She looked at him.

"Perhaps."

He helped her up to her feet. Quickly she mounted the ladder and stepped
into the room.

"Good-by!" she said, looking down at him and smiling.

"Good-by!" he answered, looking up.

She made a pretense of shutting a door and withdrawing into privacy. He
lit his pipe, hesitated a moment, then went to lie down under her room.
Now he no longer saw her, but he heard her movements overhead. The dry
brushwood crackled as she lay down, as she settled herself. She was
lying surely at full length. He guessed that she had stretched out her
arms and put her two hands under her head. She sighed. Below he echoed
her sigh with a long breath of contentment. Then they both lay very
still.

Marathon!

He remembered his schoolbooks. He remembered beginning Greek. He had
never been very good at Greek. His mother, if she had been a man and had
gone to Oxford or Cambridge, would have made a far better classic than
he. She had helped him sometimes during the holidays when he was
quite small. He remembered exactly how she had looked when he had been
conjugating--half-loving and half-satirical. He had made a good many
mistakes. Later he had read Greek history with his mother, he had read
about the battle of Marathon.

"Marathon"--it was written in his school history, "became a magic
word at Athens . . . the one hundred and ninety-two Athenians who had
perished in the battle were buried on the field, and over their remains
a tumulus or mound was erected, which may still be seen about half
a mile from the sea." As a small boy he had read that with a certain
inevitable detachment. And now here he lay, a man, on that very tumulus,
and the brushwood creaked above his head with the movement of the woman
he loved.

How wonderful was the weaving of the Fates!

And if some day he should sit in the place of his mother, and should
hear a small boy, his small boy, conjugating. By Jove! He would have to
rub up his classics! Not for ten years old; he wasn't so bad as that;
but for twenty, when the small boy would be going up to Oxford, and
would, perhaps, be turning out alarmingly learned.

Rosamund the mother of a young man!

But Dion shied away from that. He could imagine her as the mother of a
child, beautiful mother of a child almost as beautiful; but he could not
conceive of her as the "mater" of a person with a mustache.

Their youth, their youth--must it go?

Again she moved slightly above him. The twigs crackled, making an almost
irritable music of dryness. Again the lowing of cattle came over that
old battlefield from the edge of the sea. And just then, at that very
moment, Dion knew that his great love could not stand still, that, like
all great things, it must progress. And the cry, that intense human cry,
"Whither?" echoed in the deep places of his soul. Whither were he and
his great love going? To what end were they journeying? For a moment
sadness invaded him, the sadness of one who thinks and is very ignorant.
Why cannot a man think deeply without thinking of an end? "All things
come to an end!" That cruel saying went through his mind like footsteps
echoing on iron, and a sense of fear encompassed him. There is something
terrible in a great love, set in the little life of a man like a vast
light in a tiny attic.