And the figure cried in a voice that grated down the winds of space: ‘Lo! I am he that cannot die! Lo! I am he that has eaten of the Tree of Life; who am the Lord of Time and of the races of the earth that shall flock to my standard!’
And again: ‘Lo! I am he that God was impotent to destroy because I had eaten of the fruit! He cannot control that which He hath created. He hath builded His temple upon His impotence, and it shall fall and crush Him. The children of His misrule cry out against Him. There is no God but Antichrist!’
Then from all sides came hurrying across the plain vast multitudes of the degenerate children of men, naked and unsightly; and they leaped and mouthed about the figure on the hillock, like hounds baying a dead fox held aloft; and from their swollen throats came one cry:
‘There is no God but Antichrist!’
And thereat the figure turned about – and it was Cartaphilus the Jew.
VII
There is no death! What seems so is transition.
Uttering an incoherent cry, Rose came to himself with a shock of agony and staggered to his feet. In the act he traversed no neutral ground of insentient purposelessness. He caught the thread of being where he had dropped it – grasped it with an awful and sublime resolve that admitted no least thought of self-interest.
If his senses were for the moment amazed at their surroundings – the silence, the perfumed languor, the beauty and voluptuousness of the room – his soul, notwithstanding, stood intent, unfaltering – waiting merely the physical capacity for action.
The fragments of the broken vessel were scattered at his feet; the blood of his wound had hardened upon his face. He took a dizzy step forward, and another. The girl lay as he had seen her cast herself down – breathing, he could see; her hair in disorder; her hands clenched together in terror or misery beyond words.
Where was the other?
Suddenly his vision cleared. He saw that the silken curtains of the alcove were closed.
A poniard in a jewelled sheath lay, with other costly trifles, on a settle hard by. He seized and, drawing it, cast the scabbard clattering on the floor. His hands would have done; but this would work quicker.
Exhaling a quick sigh of satisfaction, he went forward with a noiseless rush and tore apart the curtains.
Yes – he was there – the Jew – the breathing enormity, stretched silent and motionless. The shadow of the young man’s lifted arm ran across his white shirt front like a bar sinister.
To rid the world of something monstrous and abnormal – that was all Rose’s purpose and desire. He leaned over to strike. The face, stiff and waxen as a corpse’s, looked up into his with a calm impenetrable smile – looked up, for all its eyes were closed. And this was a horrible thing, that, though the features remained fixed in that one inexorable expression, something beneath them seemed alive and moving – something that clouded or revealed them as when a sheet of paper glowing in the fire wavers between ashes and flame. Almost he could have thought that the soul, detached from its envelope, struggled to burst its way to the light.
An instant he dashed his left palm across his eyes; then shrieking, ‘Let the fruit avail you now!’ drove the steel deep into its neck with a snarl.
In the act, for all his frenzy, he had a horror of the spurting blood that he knew must foul his hand obscenely, and sprinkle his face, perhaps, as when a finger half-plugs a flowing water-tap.
None came! The fearful white wound seemed to suck at the steel, making a puckered mouth of derision.
A thin sound, like the whinny of a dog, issued from Rose’s lips. He pulled out the blade – it came with a crackling noise, as if it had been drawn through parchment.
Incredulous – mad – in an ecstasy of horror, he stabbed again and again. He might as fruitfully have struck at water. The slashed and gaping wounds closed up so soon as he withdrew the steel, leaving not a scar.
With a scream he dashed the unstained weapon on the floor and sprang back into the room. He stumbled and almost fell over the prostrate figure of the girl.
A strength as of delirium stung and prickled in his arms. He stooped and forcibly raised her – held her against his breast – addressed her in a hurried passion of entreaty.
‘In the name of God, come with me! In the name of God, divorce yourself from this horror! He is the abnormal! – the deathless – the Antichrist!’
Her lids were closed; but she listened.
‘Adnah, you have given me myself. My reason cannot endure the gift alone. Have mercy and be pitiful, and share the burden!’
At last she turned on him her swimming gaze.
‘Oh! I am numbed and lost! What would you do with me?’
With a sob of triumph he wrapped his arms hard about her, and sought her lips with his. In the very moment of their meeting, she drew herself away, and stood panting and gazing with wide eyes over his shoulder. He turned.
A young man of elegant appearance was standing by the table where he had lately leaned.
In the face of the newcomer the animal and the fanatic were mingled, characteristics inseparable in pseudo-revelation.
He was unmistakably a Jew, of the finest primitive type – such as might have existed in preneurotic days. His complexion was of a smooth golden russet; his nose and lips were cut rather in the lines of sensuous cynicism; the look in his polished brown eyes was of defiant self-confidence, capable of the extremes of devotion or of obstinacy. Short curling black hair covered his scalp, and his moustache and small crisp beard were of the same hue.
‘Thanks, stranger,’ he said, in a somewhat nasal but musical voice. ‘Your attack – a little cowardly, perhaps, for all its provocation – has served to release me before my time. Thanks – thanks indeed!’
Amos sent a sick and groping glance towards the alcove. The curtain was pulled back – the couch was empty. His vision returning, caught sight of Adnah still standing motionless.
‘No, no!’ he screeched in a suffocated voice, and clasped his hands convulsively.
There was an adoring expression in her wet eyes that grew and grew. In another moment she had thrown herself at the stranger’s feet.
‘Master,’ she cried, in a rich and swooning voice: ‘O Lord and Master – as blind love foreshadowed thee in these long months!’
He smiled down upon her.
‘A tender welcome on the threshold,’ he said softly, ‘that I had almost renounced. The young spirit is weak to confirm the self-sacrifice of the old. But this ardent modern, Adnah, who, it seems, has slipped his opportunity?’
Passionately clasping the hands of the young Jew, she turned her face reluctant.
‘He has blood on him,’ she whispered. ‘His lip is swollen like a schoolboy’s with fighting. He is not a man, sane, self-reliant and glorious – like you, O my heart!’
The Jew gave a high, loud laugh, which he checked in mid-career.
‘Sir,’ he said derisively, ‘we will wish you a very pleasant good-morning.’
How – under what pressure or by what process of self-effacement – he reached the street, Amos could never remember. His first sense of reality was in the stinging cold, which made him feel, by reaction, preposterously human.
It was perhaps six o’clock of a February morning, and the fog had thinned considerably, giving place to a wan and livid glow that was but half-measure of dawn.
He found himself going down the ringing pavement that was talcous with a sooty skin of ice, a single engrossing resolve hammering time in his brain to his footsteps.
The artificial glamour was all past and gone – beaten and frozen out of him. The rest was to do – his plain duty as a Christian, as a citizen – above all, as a gentleman. He was, unhypnotised, a law-abiding young man, with a hatred of notoriety and a detestation of the abnormal. Unquestionably his forebears had made a huge muddle of his inheritance.
About a quarter to seven he walked (rather unsteadily) into Vine Street Police Station and accosted the inspector on duty.
‘I want to lay an information.’
The officer scrutinised him, professionally, from the under side, and took up a pen.
‘What’s the charge?’
‘Administering a narcotic, attempted murder, abduction, profanity, trading under false pretences, wandering at large – great heavens! what isn’t it?’
‘Perhaps you’ll say. Name of accused?’
‘Cartaphilus.’
‘Any other?’
‘The Wandering Jew.’
The Inspector laid down his pen and leaned forward, bridging his finger-tips under his chin.
‘If you take my advice,’ he said, ‘you’ll go and have a Turkish bath.’
The young man grasped and frowned.
‘You won’t take my information?’
‘Not in that form. Come again by-and-by.’
Amos walked straight out of the building and retraced his steps to Wardour Street.
‘I’ll watch for his coming out,’ he thought, ‘and have him arrested, on one charge only, by the constable on the beat. Where’s the place?’
Twice he walked the length of the street and back, with dull increasing amazement. The sunlight had edged its way into the fog by this time, and every door and window stood out sleek and self-evident. But amongst them all was none that corresponded to the door or window of his adventure.
He hung about till day was bright in the air, and until it occurred to him that his woeful and bloodstained appearance was beginning to excite unflattering comment. At that he trudged for the third time the entire length to and fro, and so coming out into Oxford Street stood on the edge of the pavement, as though it were the brink of Cocytus.
‘Well, she called me a boy,’ he muttered; ‘what does it matter?’
He hailed an early hansom and jumped in.
THE SHADOW-DANCE
‘Yes, it was a rum start,’ said the modish young man.
He was a modern version of the crutch and toothpick genus, a derivative from the ‘Gaiety boy’ of the Nellie Farren epoch, very spotless, very superior, very – fundamentally and combatively – simple. I don’t know how he had found his way into Carleon’s rooms and our company, but Carleon had a liking for odd characters. He was a collector, as it were, of human pottery, and to the collector, as we know, primitive examples are of especial interest.
The bait in this instance, I think, had been Bridge, which, since some formal ‘Ducdame’ must serve for calling fools into a circle, was our common pretext for assembling for an orgy of talk. We had played, however, for insignificant stakes and, on the whole, irreverently as regarded the sanctity of the game; and the young man was palpably bored. He thought us, without question, outsiders, and not altogether good form; and it was even a relief to him when the desultory play languished, and conversation became general in its place.
Somebody – I don’t remember on what provocation – had referred to the now historic affair of the Hungarian Ballet, which, the rage in London for a season, had voluntarily closed its own career a week before the date advertised for its termination; and the modish young man, it appeared, was the only one of us all who had happened to be present in the theatre on the occasion of the final performance. He told us so; and added that ‘it was a rum start’.
‘The abrupt finish was due, of course,’ said Carleon, bending forward, hectic, bright-eyed, and hugging himself, as was his wont, ‘to Kaunitz’s death. She was the bright particular “draw”. It would have been nothing without her. Besides, there was the tragedy. What was the “rum start”? Tell us.’
‘The way it ended that night,’ said the young man. He was a little abashed by the sudden concentration of interest on himself; but carried it off with sang-froid. Only a slight flush of pink on his youthful cheek, as he flicked the ash from his cigarette with the delicate little finger of the hand that held it, confessed to a certain uneasy self-consciousness.
‘I have heard something about it,’ said Carleon. ‘Give us your version.’
‘I’m no hand at describing things,’ responded the young man, committed and at bay; ‘never wrote a line of description in my life, nor wanted to. It was the Shadow-Dance, you know – the last thing on the programme. I dare say some of you have seen Kaunitz in it.’
One or two of us had. It was incomparably the most beautiful, the most mystic, idyll achieved by even that superlative dancer; a fantasia of moonlight, supported by an ethereal, only half-revealed, shimmer of attendant sylphids.
‘Yes,’ said Carleon eagerly.
‘Well, you know,’ said the young man, ‘there is a sort of dance first, in and out of the shadows, a mysterious, gossamery kind of business, with nobody made out exactly, and the moon slowly rising behind the trees. And then, suddenly, the moon reaches a gap in the branches, and – and it’s full moon, don’t you know, a regular white blaze of it, and all the shapes have vanished; only you sort of guess them, get a hint of their arms and faces hiding behind the leaves and under the shrubs and things. And that was the time when Kaunitz ought to have come on.’
‘Didn’t she come on?’
‘Not at first; not when she ought to. There was a devil of a pause, and you could see something was wrong. And after a bit there was a sort of rustle in the house, and people began to cough; and the music slipped round to the beginning again; and they danced it all over a second time, until it came to the full moonlight – and there she was this time all right – how, I don’t know, for I hadn’t seen her enter.’
‘How did she dance – when she did appear?’
The young man blew the ash from his cigarette. ‘Oh, I don’t know!’ he said.
‘You must know. Wasn’t it something quite out of the common? You called it a rum start, you remember.’
‘Well, if you insist upon it, it was – the most extraordinary thing I ever witnessed – more like what they describe the Pepper’s Ghost business than anything else I can think. She was here, there, anywhere; seemingly independent of what d’ye call – gravitation, you know; she seemed to jump and hang in the air before she came down. And there was another thing. The idea was to dance to her own shadow, you see – follow it, run away from it, flirt with it – and it was the business of the moon, or the limelight man, to keep the shadow going.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, there was no shadow – not a sign of one.’
‘That may have been the limelight man’s fault.’
‘Very likely; but I don’t think so. There was something odd about it all; and most in the way she went.’
‘How was that?’
‘Why, she just gave a spring, and was gone.’
Carleon sank back, with a sigh as if of repletion, and sat softly cracking his fingers together.
‘Didn’t you notice anything strange about the house, the audience?’ he said – ‘people crying out; girls crouching and hiding their faces, for instance?’
‘Perhaps, now I think of it,’ answered the modish youth. ‘I noticed, anyhow, that the curtain came down with a bang, and that there seemed a sort of general flurry and stampede of things, both behind it and on our side.’
‘Well, as to that, it is a fact, though you may not know it, that after that night the company absolutely refused to complete its engagement on any terms.’
‘I dare say. They had lost Kaunitz.’
‘To be sure they had. She was already lying dead in her dressing-room when the Shadow-Dance began.’
‘Not when it began?’
‘So, anyhow, it was whispered.’
‘Oh I say,’ said the young man, looking rather white; ‘I’m not going to believe that, you know.’
WILLIAM TYRWHITT’S ‘COPY’
This is the story of William Tyrwhitt, who went to King’s Cobb for rest and change, and, with the latter, at least, was so far accommodated as for a time to get beyond himself and into regions foreign to his experiences or his desires. And for this condition of his I hold myself something responsible, inasmuch as it was my inquisitiv
eness was the means of inducing him to an exploration, of which the result, with its measure of weirdness, was for him alone. But, it seems, I was appointed an agent of the unexplainable without my knowledge, and it was simply my misfortune to find my first unwitting commission in the selling of a friend.
I was for a few days, about the end of a particular July, lodged in that little old seaboard town of Dorset that is called King’s Cobb. Thither there came to me one morning a letter from William Tyrwhitt, the polemical journalist (a queer fish, like the cuttle, with an ink-bag for the confusion of enemies), complaining that he was fagged and used up, and desiring me to say that nowhere could complete rest be obtained as in King’s Cobb.
I wrote and assured him on this point. The town, I said, lay wrapped in the hills as in blankets, its head only, winking a sleepy eye, projecting from the top of the broad, steep gully in which it was stretched at ease. Thither few came to the droning coast; and such as did, looked up at the High Street baking in the sun, and, thinking of Jacob’s ladder, composed them to slumber upon the sand and left the climbing to the angels. Here, I said, the air and the sea were so still that one could hear the oysters snoring in their beds; and the little frizzle of surf on the beach was like to the sound to dreaming ears of bacon frying in the kitchens of the blest.
William Tyrwhitt came, and I met him at the station, six or seven miles away. He was all strained and springless, like a broken child’s toy – ‘not like that William who, with lance in rest, shot through the lists in Fleet Street’. A disputative galley-puller could have triumphed over him morally; a child physically.
The drive in the inn brake, by undulating roads and scented valleys, shamed his cheek to a little flush of self-assertion.
‘I will sleep under the vines,’ he said, ‘and the grapes shall drop into my mouth.’
‘Beware,’ I answered, ‘lest in King’s Cobb your repose should be everlasting. The air of that hamlet has matured like old port in the bin of its hills, till to drink of it is to swoon.’
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