“Say, tell me, is she a pretty girl, Lemonias: have you seen her? What’s she like? I won’t look at any pig in a poke.”
The secretary stared,
“You’re not thinking of marrying her, Mr Smith?”
“Why not? I have a natural affinity for pearls, cotton-fields and swans swimming on lakes of rupees: provided the girl’s presentable and young—why not?”
“But, Mr Smith, the lemons—”
“Haw, haw, what a lemon-tree—”
“But she’s black!”
“Have you seen her? Besides, with the native laws, perhaps here a wife and in England a leman—”
“But the marriage settlement!”
“Hm, hm: well, find out what she’s like! Her old man’s a pale lemon colour, not dark at all—”
The secretary presently learned that the girl had had a white mother and a white grandmother and was herself indistinguishable from girls of white blood, except by the lustre of her eyes and hair: that she was a beauty, a scholar in Oriental languages, young and charming.
St. Clemens went to visit his proposed father-in-law and waited some time in a garden beneath a flowering tree beside a well. A slight breeze moved the tree and ever and anon it dropped its petals on the water: they floated together and made a little island of half-drowned flowers. St. Clemens leaned over the pool and amongst the branches of the tree he saw reflected another floating islet, a beautiful face, pale and passionate, surrounded by leaves. He looked up, and the girl dropped to the ground, and said,
“I am Lemonias,” in a cold but submissive voice.
St. Clemens married her, and his return journey was strewn with orange and lemon flowers.
Two years later he had a son, a beautiful child, but with a complexion slightly tinged with olive: the father, undisturbed, laughed and said,
“What can I do? I cut open a lemon in the East and there found his mother sitting in pearls and silks: this is her pepin. What matters to me is not his rind, but his seeds, juice and natural oils.”
He loves passionately his magically-derived son. He had him baptised in St. Clement Danes, and when the bells rang out the familiar tune, an angelic smile spread over his grand-vizier face, and St. Clemens said,
“My love, all my fortune and happiness came from these bells: their strange vibrations penetrated to the far east, and fluttered a charming flower on to my shoulder from a tree.”
And his wife replied with an acid word, for she had been enamoured of a pale East India Man, a cherub-faced subaltern from Harrow, with no money, little family and no brain, for very naturally she preferred lemons.
AFTER supper, when they were together, the Centenarist began to tell them what he had read in the old books of scripture and romance.
“It is a pity the Old Man is not here,” said the Centenarist, “for I had imagined a sermon on death, hellfire and the devil, which I am sure he would like.”
“Say on,” said the Festival Director: “no doubt there are some of us who complain at present when we find ourselves in an apartment without central heating, forgetting that one day there may be too much.”
THE CENTENARIST’S TALES
IN an islet of Lough Deargh in Ireland was a cavern leading into a labyrinth of caves, called “St. Patrick’s Purgatory”. In the twelfth, thirteenth and later centuries, the pilgrim, after a ritual of fasting, confession and masses, drank of a cup of wine containing a drug secretly put there by the priests, and was led to the mouth of the cave with a staff and a rosary. He wandered in the labyrinth and was terrified by flaming masks, bogies, whistles, serpents, curtains of thick spiderwebs which clung to his breast and face, cloths which hung about the height of his forehead softly blown by the vapours of the cavern, and other inventions of his ghostly counsellors. At length, overcome by fatigue and the hot vapours, he sank down and fell into dreams which presented to him in more or less lively colours his preconceptions of hell. No doubt the secret chamber, in which the preparatory mass was held, was painted with a vigorous brush to represent scenes of the underworld. Moreover, it seems certain from the testimony of the pilgrims, and the stories told about the place, that those who went into St. Patrick’s Purgatory actually suffered physical torments: some were scourged, bitten, scored by knives, some had the marks of prongs and others were lacerated with cords or had their feet torn. They easily imagined that they had descended living, to inferno. These torments suffered while living, were supposed to remit a great portion of the torments to come, and were paid for handsomely by the credulous. Sometimes the pilgrim did not awake in the cavern, but died, suffocated by the vapours, or terrified by the apparitions.
From such priestly ingenuity, and from other caverns, hot springs and smoky fissures in the earth, from volcanoes and earthquakes, we conceived the underworld. There are races which have imagined hell as a cool and silent place, as in an ancient story I will tell you.
In this tale, a youth learned that a certain cave led to the land of the dead. He entered it, and after passing a long time through darkness, perceived a violet light and next a green, and last a yellow light, sunlight. He came out into a beautiful land, silent, green, with luxuriant meadows and forests, with singing birds and houses of crystals. There, among hosts of shades with downcast, musing, or innocently gay eyes, he met friends and relatives, and with them his mother, now dark-haired and roundfaced, like a young girl. They smiled at him and some held his hands. They never ate, and they spoke among themselves, when he was at a distance, in a language incomprehensible to him, and always, it seemed, of grave or celestial matters. Sometimes they would all fall silent as they stood about, while the birds burst out singing; at those times he would see the ground alive with strange animals; griffins, green and red, swayed in the branches of the trees, eating melons and grapes; huge crowned snakes, marked with a thousand different patterns, like Persian carpets, brilliant, harmless, would pass through the grass and meadow-flowers. The shades caressed the beasts as they passed. He understood, although no-one spoke to him, that his mother wished to keep him there. He said to her:
“I must go back; here, dearest mother, you remain fair and young, but I lose the precious years of life. Soon, according to the days of hell, I will come down: now, let me return.”
Then he understood that he could not return unless someone would venture down in his place, and he said to his mother:
“There is one who will think of coming to look for me, that is Pauli, my servant, who is my age, and who has often said he would lay down his life for me if necessary.”
The mother-shade was permitted to go up into the earth and try to persuade someone to return to replace her son. She went to Pauli the servant, but he had fallen in love with a young girl and would not quit the earth. But she soon returned, and the youth perceived that he was free to leave the land of the dead.
He went out quickly, thinking of the streets of his native town, the courtyard of his father’s house, the sports-ground where the boys exercised and his friends, especially of Ailu, a dear friend, who was like a brother to him. He did not look back and he soon came into the twilights which preceded the dark region. So quickly he went that he did not observe someone who was descending, and he was obliged to step aside hastily to avoid a collision. It was a soul which had just left the earth. When the youth looked closely, because the shade smiled at him, he saw it was his friend Ailu. “Are you dead, Ailu?” he said, and burst out crying. Ailu said to him in the faint voice that still remained to him:
“Your mother came to me in dreams and wooed me to the underworld.”
“What misery!” said the youth: “Ailu, it was to save me she did it: she beguiled you down here, so that I could get back to earth. I wandered into that cave out of curiosity and would have had to stay down here, if someone had not come down in my place.”
“You are my brother,” said Ailu: “it is very natural I should come in your place: if I had known the whole business, I would have come, just the same.”
And he hurried on through the twilights, while the living youth mounted towards the surface of the earth. The people who knew him in the upper world found him changed as if he had been absent ten years. The next day the youth went back to the cave, resolved to go down into the land of the dead and join his friend Ailu; but he found the cave stopped with a great fall of earth and rocks. That cave was never heard of nor penetrated again.
But (the Centenarist continued) most priests and tale-tellers have imagined hell as the place of fire and torture depicted on many a church-door and in many a religious painting: as, in the Cathedral of Bourges, where simpering and grimacing men and women are driven by demons with faces in their bellies, hams and elbows, towards a boiling cauldron. This hell is the hell of many religions. There is the North Buddhist legend of Avalokitesvara, who came to show the damned the way to Nirvana. It was prophesied that he would bring all misery to an end, even the torments of the hell Avichi, the region of the prêtas and the Kingdom of Yama. Powerful lights were projected from his body which lit up with their brilliance the thousand worlds of the universe and even the flaming hells, and caused at his approach all misery, evil and fear to die as the plants shrivel up at the approach of a flame. After him came a soothing shower to calm those too exalted by his splendour, and those tender things that might be wilted by his light. He came over the seas and mountains and approached the terrible gulf in the high mountain ranges which is the entrance to hell. There is a city built on a precipice of black glass; down its roads of black glass, clouds roll all day between the houses. Above this gulf eagles and vultures forever circle high in the sky, to seize the daring who might try to scale the black walls: on the other side of this region, shepherds feed their flocks and monks potter about their monasteries, ignorant that they live on the brink of eternity.
There, taking a leap from the top of the cliff, which is five thousand feet high above the first hellish fogs that roll, he plunged towards hell, and the glass walls flamed with a thousand reflections of light as he fell. As he approached, the groans, shrieks and the ravings of those gone mad in the torments grew less, ceased; till, walking on the bubbling lake of fire as firm ground, he entered the hell Avichi. All beheld him as an earthly prince, but a giant in stature and splendid in majesty, clothed in light and surrounded by a thousand swords and a thousand angels. When they perceived him, their pangs ceased altogether; as they continued to gaze, their wounds healed and those who had lost their reason became sane. Sweet breezes took the place of flames in that dreadful cavern, the immeasurable cauldron of iron burst and spread over the cooling soil as a pleasant stream from which flowers arose, and the sea of fire changed into a pool whose shores were out of sight, where lotus flowers sprang in myriads and canoes glided without human hands.
Then all arose from their postures of agony, and their chains fell off, leaving their naked bodies whole. Hell became a place of joy, and even Yama the king showed reverence to the heaven-descended one. “What if it were only a moment’s respite,” think the damned, “we should still praise him and rejoice.” But the hero instructed them in the notions of righteousness, and leading them on through the gardens of morality and the fountains of the law, taught them all that was missing before in their imperfect minds, and in the end, after many trials, they were able to enter Nirvana. What a solace is this history! It seems that hell is not eternal and that, at the end of time, suffering will be relieved …
“Yes, and before,” said the Schoolboy, “if we leave these old yams for the idlest of our idle days, as now, and go out explorers for the earthly paradise. Why, these brilliant visions of hell are made out of the thousand pinpricks, backaches and disappointments of the wretched millions of the earth. The theory of hell works backwards: the wretched imagine a hell infinitely horrible to console themselves for the sufferings of this life. That is how it arose, your hell, and not out of the volcano, the priest’s smoky mouth, or the oppressed dreams of one who over-ate.”
“He is a very nice boy, that boy,” said the Old Lady in an undertone: “my boy was like that when he was young. Now, of course, he is settled down, and has three very fine children, and one of them is a genius, I would say, and I say it quite impartially.”
“Do you know of anyone who has lately been in hell?” said the Festival Director, dreamily, no doubt speculating on some new stage-setting.
“That, too,” said the Centenarist. “I know a poet who takes drugs and has ruined his imagination, which is haunted by pools of blood, entrances to morgues with icicles hanging on the keystone, palefaced ladies, horses in winding-sheets and bulls whose hides are covered with craters like the moon’s; and his sleep at night is interrupted by shrieks, heavy sighs and long mutterings. I know a man who went mad and who now has to listen till the end of his days to the garrulous follies or the shrieks of madmen who have imagined more than they can bear. I know a close-knit family where the grave dissensions of the husband and wife, over an inheritance which was disputed by the husband in secret, have ruined the children’s health and their chance of making a marriage, and where the youngest screams at the nightmares he sees in his sleep—”
“Ugh,” said the Frenchwoman: “how horrible! I don’t want to hear those things that you can read any day in the daily paper, but a real horror: frighten us, startle us, but tell us something true, nevertheless.”
“A young man I knew,” said the Centenarist smiling, “went to the war, gay, inventive, always whistling and jollying the girls, always ready to do a vaudeville turn, and he returned sick, silent and timid, and lives in the shadow of a big, bustling wife who makes believe he is a baby and has no idea of the boy he used to be.”
“You don’t like wives,” said the Public Stenographer: “I am very observant, I have noticed it before.”
“You must not hold that against me,” said the Centenarist: “to begin with, I never had a wife, so I cannot be an authority on wives.
“And then there was a philosopher I knew in New York, who is world famous and very much loved. Sometimes when I went out from the chess club, at five o’clock in the morning, when the milkmen were rattling round, the street sweepers were out, and the first workmen with picks and shovels were sleeping on the benches waiting for work to begin, I would cross Central Park and there meet, walking gently and thoughtfully, in the light of the rising sun, my philosopher. One day I said to him, ‘Why do you always get up so early? You are an old man, you need sleep: and I see that you have become frail in the last few years.’ He shook his head, clasped his hands behind his back, and after a few moments, he said quietly, ‘I get up every morning an hour earlier, to have an hour free to hate my wife.’
“But he was a philosopher; he is not like ordinary men, and I am quite convinced that most men are very, very fond of their wives. But to return to my war veteran. The journalists writing of war veterans always say they have been ‘through hell’. This was my friend’s descent.
“He was badly wounded in a retreat and was left with the dead in the trench. When he came to himself, he drank some brandy he found in a flask near him and dragged himself a long way without meeting a living creature. When night came on he found himself near a shed with a locked door, and he decided to shelter there for the night. Meanwhile, he had noticed all around him in the earth, which was torn up, a frightful smell of decaying flesh; but he was exhausted and could go no farther. He managed after a long struggle to break the lock off the door. The door swung open, a violent smell rushed out and half a dozen sacks fell on him. Pulling at these bundles he pulled away a hand, an arm, and thrust his arm into something pulpy, which he found to be the belly of a man. He was lying there crumpled up under the bodies of soldiers which had been stacked there hastily during the recent retreat. He crept a little way from the shed. The next morning he was discovered by a peasant who brought a cart and carted him a long way over the blasted land, until they came in sight of a building with the red cross painted on it. He felt solaced, my friend, at the sight of the building
, and was astonished to hear as they approached, terrible shrieks and shouts, men’s voices sobbing and crying out ‘God!’
“Someone came out from a building lying in the grounds and spoke to the peasant, and my friend said irritably, ‘What is that damnable noise I hear?’
“‘It is coming from the field hospital,’ said the attendant.
“‘Is it a madhouse? I’m not mad,’ said my friend.
“‘It’s a surgical station,’ said the attendant.
“All that day and night the abominable shrieking went on; sometimes there were many voices, as if a diabolical passion shook the entire building, sometimes one particularly, and then several, with the plaints of souls in torment, but much worse than anyone could imagine in his life. My friend said to the nurse, waking from the heavy stupor he had sunk into after being kept awake all night by the cries:
“‘In the name of God, what is going on over there? Are they shell shocked?’
“‘No,’ said the attendant, ‘it sounds bad. This is a surgical station and we have no anaesthetics: we haven’t had any for weeks. We are completely cut off: everything has to be done on the living flesh: most of the attendants have deserted, they couldn’t stand it.’
“My friend’s own operation was done likewise ‘on the living flesh’.
“He has been a sick man since that time. When one has seen those things, one is a changed man for the rest of life.”
THE Banker said: “Is it possible? Who has ever heard of such a terrible thing?”
They all took coffee and liqueurs to forget the Centenarist’s gloomy tale.
IN this way ended the third day of the Tales.
THE FOURTH DAY
WHEN the Salzburg guests reached the Capuchin Wood at ten o’clock in the morning of the fourth day, they found the Banker there already, sitting on a seat with his wife. When he saw them coming up the path, he got up as if to make off through the wood, but when he found it was too late, he smiled and said to the Festival Director:
The Salzburg Tales Page 22